Category — China

Via AFP:

Chinese K8 Korakum trainer. (Image: sinodefense.com)

Venezuela will buy combat and training aircraft from China this week, leftist Venezuela President Hugo Chavez confirmed in a television broadcast Sunday.

The purchases will be made as part of a six-country tour, Chavez said in his broadcast of the “Alo President” television program from the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, hours before leaving on a “strategic interest” trip to Cuba, China, Russia, Belarus, France and Portugal.

Chavez, a staunch foe of the US government, confirmed that during his stay in Beijing he will purchase 24 K-8 aircraft “to train fighter pilots.” The planes could be part of Venezuela’s air force by next year.

The president also confirmed that while in Beijing he will arrange the construction of tanker vessels in Chinese shipyards, with the aim of installing a shipyard in Venezuela in the near future.

These plans come in addition to the construction of a refinery in China to process oil from Venezuela, and plans to create a bi-national company to install a refinery in the remote oil-rich Orinoco region in eastern Venezuela. [Read more →]

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According to a brief note made today by Cuban state media, Celia and Abel Hart Santamaría died Sunday afternoon in an automobile accident in Havana. Celia (45 years old) and Abel (48 years old) are the children of Armando Hart Dávalos, a member of the Cuban nomenklatura (first Minister of Education served as the Minister of Culture) and Haydee Santamaría (one of the women who participated in the Moncada Barracks attack in 1953).

Celia Hart recently achieved notoriety as a visible head of a Trotsky faction of the Cuban nomenklatura. She was critical of capitalist state models in post-Soviet Russia, China and Vietnam. She was also linked within the Cuba’s nomenklatura, which was highly critical of Raulismo and his entrepreneurial generals even though such criticism was never made in public within the Island, the media, or public appearances but she did express outside of Cuba as a spokeswoman of that group.

[H/T: La Nueva Cuba]

See also: Sectors of Cuban nomenklatura against Chinese-like transition

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The September/October 2008 edition of Military Review (pdf) published by the US Army Combined Arms Center has an article on Chinese military influence in Latin America.  A section addresses Cuba’s military acquisition of Chinese arms and technology, as follows:

Norinco Type 89 Armored Personnel Carrier. (Photo: China North Industries Corp.)

Special case: Cuba. Cuba has increasingly relied on Chinese assistance for its military because of generous terms. China helped Cuba upgrade its air defense system by providing more advanced communications equipment, improving its integration and central control, and assisting with maintenance and spare parts. China has also helped the Cuban air force maintain its aging Soviet-era fleet and upgrade some of its MIG-21s. China’s Northern Industries supplied the Cuban military with APCs, transport vehicles, and logistics equipment. However, it’s unlikely Cuba will make any major arms purchases from the PRC or that China will be willing to supply them. Advanced systems that would significantly enhance Cuban power projection capabilities—such as missiles, J series fighter jets, more capable radar and command systems, and naval assets equipped with cruise missiles—are therefore unlikely to come from China.

Cuba is unlikely to acquire such systems for three reasons. First, its doctrine does not envisage any power projection capability. To do so would be futile because of the proximity and tremendous power of the United States. Despite ts anti-American rhetoric, Havana is well aware of the risks of provoking Washington when Cuba no longer enjoys super-power protection. Second, Cuba’s anomalous and stagnant economy cannot afford such systems even at Chinese prices. Third, various Cuban officers and others from across Latin America report that the Cuban military is not happy with the quality of Chinese weapons. (A Thai colonel who served over a decade as an armor officer operating Chinese and American tanks said, “Chinese equipment is fairly good in the first two to three years. After that, it gets all rusty. I would rather use a 15-year old American M-11 than a 4-year old Chinese APC.”)

For its part, China believes arming Cuba with advanced weapons systems endangers China’s relations with the United States. Challenging the U.S. from a country that neighbors the U.S. and arouses strong emotions in Washington might cost China more than any benefits it gained. Therefore, Beijing is cautious in dealing with Havana. Professor Guo Shuyong, an international relations expert at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says, “We remember the Monroe Doctrine and respect U.S. influence in Latin America. China is not like the Soviet Union 50 years ago. There will be no Cuban missile crisis.”

During a trip to Latin America in 2004, President Hu Jintao of China spent only a short time in Cuba and while there, refrained from making any comments that gave the impression the PRC intended to forge an alliance with Fidel Castro. Since then, Chinese trade and investment has been rather insignificant when compared with its presence in other South American countries, such as Brazil and Argentina.

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Reuters reports:

The United States ranked among communist Cuba’s top five trading partners for the first time in 2007 despite the decades-old U.S. trade embargo, as U.S. agriculture sales increased by $100 million.

Trade data for 2007 posted on the Web site of Cuba’s National Statistics Office (www.one.cu) placed the United States fifth at $582 million, compared with $484 million in 2006, including shipping costs.

The United States, which began selling food to Cuba in 2002 under an amendment to the embargo, placed seventh in 2006 and 2005.

Revolutionary ally Venezuela and communist China were Cuba’s top trading partners at $2.698 billion and $2.457 billion respectively, with Canada placing third and Spain fourth, each at more than $1 billion.

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The Economist has a piece on the effects of the embargo and foreign investment in Cuba:

FOR almost half a century, the United States has imposed a trade embargo against Cuba. And yet it sometimes seems barely visible. Across the island, American brands are ubiquitous. Tourists can order a Coca-Cola (made in Mexico) in state-run hotels. Computers running Microsoft software have appeared in the capital’s few electronics stores. A fleet of Ford tankers refuel aeroplanes at Havana’s airport. Taking advantage of an exemption introduced in 2000, American farmers have become Cuba’s biggest source of food imports, a cash trade worth $600m a year. No wonder that some Cubans wonder whether the “blockade” which the government blames for nearly all of Cuba’s problems might be some sort of Orwellian trick. “Does it really exist?” asks a medical student in Havana. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

But plenty of companies that deal with Cuba have recently been reminded that the embargo is real. Last month, the United States’ Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, which is responsible for enforcing it, fined Minxia, a Maryland-based subsidiary of China’s MinMetals Corporation, $1.2m for dealing in Cuban metals. Gate Gourmet, a Swiss-American group, was ordered to pay $600,000 because it supplies in-flight meals to Cuba’s national airline.

Although the embargo has manifestly failed in its objective of removing Fidel Castro’s communist regime, in 1996 it was tightened by the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (better known, after the legislators who sponsored it, as Helms-Burton). This attempts to apply the embargo to foreign companies and individuals. Its extraterritorial pretension riles even many of America’s closest allies. It has notably been invoked to ban the directors of Sherritt, a Canadian firm which runs Cuba’s nickel mines, from entering the United States. (They included a former editor of The Economist). But in deference to those allies, the Act’s draconian Title III, which gives Americans who owned property in Cuba before the revolution the right to sue foreigners who now invest there, has been waived every six months, first by Bill Clinton and then by George Bush.

[Read more →]

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The European Courier has published an article titled “The Future of Cuba,” which discusses the new role of Cuba in a world in which the US is becoming less dominant (see hypotheses written by Parag Khanna of the New America Foundation and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International) and is forcing Cuba to form new relationships with the US, the EU and most importantly China.

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