The Soviet combat brigade has resumed field maneuvers in Cuba and the Carter Administration can’t do a thing about it. The announcement came from the Administration itself in an apparent effort to prevent leaks about the maneuvers and campaign rhetoric from presidential and senatorial candidates.
Last fall, when the brigade was first discovered by U.S. intelligence, the Carter Administration declared that “the status quo” was “unacceptable” to the United States. The Soviets thumbed their noses at us, and the Carter Administration was forced to accept the status quo.
Making the best of a bad situation, the State Department now says that the 2,500 to 3,000 Soviet troops with tanks, artillery and other field equipment are not a physical threat to the United States. That’s right; nobody expects the Soviet troops to make an amphibious landing in the Florida Keys and start marching north.
However, that’s not really the point. As if answering the unspoken question, the State Department release added defensively that it has “no evidence to suggest the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere in Cuba.”
If the Soviets can keep a combat brigade in Cuba, then it follows that they can put nuclear weapons in Cuba, Backfire bombers in Cuba, or nuclear submarines in Cuba, and we likewise can do nothing about the status quo.
Ask yourself what the United States would do — what we could do — if U.S. intelligence discovered missiles or bombers in Cuba. It would be a repetition of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, but with the odds completely reversed. It would be Carter who would blink, not Brezhnev, because the strategic balance is reversed.
Meanwhile, the Soviet brigade in Cuba is a threat to our interests in the Caribbean area because it is the spearhead of the Soviet-Cuban penetration of the Western Hemisphere. At least 13 major trade routes are routed through that area. Venezuelan oil, Jamaican bauxite, Brazilian manganese, and Alaskan 0i1 all move through the Caribbean waters to U.S. Eastern and Gulf ports.
The Soviets have armed Cuban military units with Soviet amphibious armored infantry combat vehicles, tanks, tank-recovery equipment, medium helicopter gunships, attack submarines, and MIG-23 and AN-26 aircraft. This last plane was identified flying military cargo to Costa Rica for delivery to the Sandinista guerrillas who overthrew the anti-Communist Somoza in Nicaragua in July 1979.
Cuba is clearly the Latin American headquarters for the training of students in Marxism-Leninism, subversion, terrorism, weaponry, and guerrilla warfare. The anti-Somoza Sandinistas (FSLN) were nurtured for years in Cuba, and ultimately given the equipment to do the job.
A CIA memo described how Castro spent 48 hours over a four-day period in March 1979 with Sandinista leaders “to hammer out a basis for cooperation.” “Cooperation” meant providing Cuban arms, ammunition and money in exchange for Cuban control.
Today, in post-Somoza Nicaragua, the Minister of Interior is Tomas Borge Martinez, an admitted Marxist who was trained in Cuba. He controls the police and internal security, and is one of the three men who rule the army. He has repeatedly gone back to Cuba for instructions and has invited at least 1,000 Cubans to Nicaragua to “edu- cate” young people.
The post-Somoza ruling junta has followed the typical Marxist pattern. It nationalized all banks and other businesses, seized 50 percent of the farm land, repudiated much of the foreign debt, cancelled all elections, and announced, “the freedom of the press we support will be a freedom of the press that supports the revolution.”
Cuba is extending its tentacles of subversion into Guatemala, El Salvador, and Jamaica. Castro has always been close to Omar Torrijos, still considered the strong man in Panama, even though he resigned the presidency.
The Monroe Doctrine had its origins in the pretensions of the Russian government in the Western Hemisphere in the early 19th century. It should be revived to stop Soviet colonization in the Caribbean.
