Feelings ran rather high this summer when Long Islanders discovered that the Russians had installed high-powered electronic equipment in a residential neighborhood and were listening in on local telephone conversations. The reaction would be explosive if the American people really knew about the enormous electronic and military installations which the Russians have stationed in Cuba.
The main complex is in the little village of Lourdes, south of Havana, where 10,000 Russians operate a sophisticated surveillance operation from some 50 buildings to which no Cubans are admitted. The Russians are able to record the electronic signatures of our B-52 bombers when they fly over the Gulf, listen to radio communications from our troop maneuvers at Fort Benning, Georgia, and monitor U.S. Navy communications from our ships operating along the Atlantic coast.
Russian ships are going in and out of Cuban ports all the time, especially the immense naval base at Cienfuegos. They are not only unloading food and fish to feed Castro’s regime, but they are also unloading Russian MIG-23 fighter-bombers, tanks, missiles, machine guns, and an endless variety of modern equipment for airfields, radar sites, and other military installations.
The Bay of Pigs defeat in 1961 set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis a year and a half later; obviously, if Castro had been overthrown, he could not have provided a missile base for Khrushchev. The Bay of Pigs failure also set the precedent for the appeasers inside our government to block every plan which would have prevented the Soviets from moving their missiles and submarines into Cuba.
While President Kennedy appeared to win a personal victory in 1972 (when Khrushchev was said to have “blinked”), Kennedy really accepted a long-term strategic defeat. The secret agreements made by the Kennedy Administration at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (1) guaranteed Castro against overthrow by any new invasion force, (2) guaranteed the Soviets a missile and submarine base 90 miles off our coast, and (3) did not guarantee the United States anything, even inspection of the missile sites. The Khrushchev-Kennedy agreement did not address the question of whether the Soviets would continue to operate freely in and out of Cuba and the Caribbean.
The Heritage Foundation has compiled a list of the steps Russia took to build up its presence in Cuba after 1962; each step was a test of the American will. The Russians sent a naval squadron in 1969, built landing bases for Bear bombers in 1970, sent a missile-firing submarine in 1972, sent two squadrons of MIG 23 fighter-bombers in 1978, and sent the famous “Combat Brigade” in 1979. In 1981, the Soviets shipped more weapons to Cuba than in any year since 1962, at least triple the amount sent to Cuba in 1979.
The Soviet Union is estimated to be pouring $3 billion a year into Cuba. That’s five times U.S. aid to all of Latin America.
A recent important article in the Reader’s Digest charges that the Soviet buildup in Cuba poses three direct threats to the United States: (1) The monitoring devices give the Russians a “picture-window look” into our national security forces. (2) Cuba gives the Russians a strategic base astride the most important air and sea lanes connecting the United States and our European allies. (3) The combined Russian-Cuban military strength is so great that it would divert a large portion of our own military forces that might be needed elsewhere in an emergency.
Suppose the Soviets again put their offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba capable of incinerating millions of Americans. Could our President force the Kremlin to back down?
If you plot on a graph the relative strengths of the Soviet and U.S. strategic forces, you will see that, at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, we enjoyed an eight-to-one superiority over the Soviet Union. U.S. power started a sharp plunge after that date, while Russian power climbed steadily upwards until, 20 years later in 1982, the strategic balance is just about completely reversed.
Nothing is gained by sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that the Russian base in Castro’s Cuba does not exist. It does. A recent public opinion poll conducted by Sindlinger and Company of Media, PA shows that 68% of the American people consider the Castro government a threat. The people appear to be ahead of their government on the Cuba question.
