Putin Restores a Cuban Beachhead The Kremlin and the Castros are chummy again, and Moscow is offering military aid.
Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes was the highest-ranking Pentagon intelligence analyst ever to be busted for working for the Castros. What’s also notable, in light of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Havana earlier this month, is that she was nabbed in 2001, long after the Cold War ended.
Besides leaking classified material and blowing the cover of covert U.S. intelligence agents, Montes seems to have been charged by her handlers with convincing top brass in Washington that Fidel Castro —who had wanted the Soviets to drop the bomb on this country during the 1962 missile crisis—no longer presents a threat to the U.S. Montes, who rose to become the U.S. military’s resident intelligence expert on Cuba, partly accomplished that mission. The Pentagon’s 1998 Cuba threat assessment played down its military and intelligence capabilities.
The best Cuba watchers were less sanguine. The Castros remain as paranoid, power-hungry and pathological as ever. They may be economic fools, but they run a good business making the island available to criminal governments, like Iran and North Korea.
Mr. Putin’s Cuba trip reinforces the point. The old Cold War villains are up to no good one more time.
Russia’s president is trying to rebuild the Soviet empire. Eastern Europe won’t cooperate and in Asia the best he will ever be is China’s junior partner. But in Latin America Mr. Putin’s KGB résumé and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the U.S. gives him traction. Colonizing Cuba again is an obvious move.