Just eight months before President Barack Obama dropped his surprise announcement that the U.S. will be opening diplomatic relations and easing economic restrictions on Cuba, the Castro government signed a new security and intelligence agreement with Russia.
Now, U.S. intelligence agencies fear that Obama's actions on Cuba threaten to reignite the dangers of the Cold War's confrontations, when the Cuban Missile Crisis came perilously close to triggering a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia.
On May 16, Col. Alejandro Castro, son of Cuban leader Raul Castro, and Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Federal Security Service, formerly the Soviet spy agency the KGB, announced that the two countries had signed an agreement that could make it easier for Russia to fly nuclear bombers over the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean,
The Washington Times reported.
It might also allow Russia to reopen its electronic intelligence listening post at Lourdes, Cuba, just 150 miles off the coast of the U.S., the Times said.
The agreement could allow Russia eventually to use Cuba as an airbase for its huge Tu-95 Bear H aircraft, capable of carrying nuclear weapons dangerously close to the U.S., the Times reports.
Already, Venezuela is extending the runway at the Maiquetia International Airport in Caracas, which would allow the bombers to land and take off from there, it said.
Reopening the Lourdes facility would give Russia a valuable outpost for eavesdropping on U.S. communications. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has denied plans to reopen Lourdes, but Russian news outlet Kommersant stated that reopening of Lourdes, which functioned from 1967-2001, was part of the Russia-Cuba agreement, the Times said.
"At its operating peak, more than 75 percent of Russia’s strategic intelligence on the U.S. came through Lourdes, including monitoring NASA’s space program at Cape Canaveral,"
Newsweek reported.
Newsweek continued: "In 2014, is a Moscow-Havana alliance as potentially consequential for the United States and its allies in the region as it once was? These, after all, were the players that in 1962 brought the world to as close to nuclear Armageddon as it has ever been."
Obama's announcement has been widely denounced by members of Congress such as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, the son of Cuban immigrants, who said, "This entire policy shift announced today is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people.
"All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to perpetuate itself in power," Rubio told
The Washington Post.
Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas Hernandez told the
Voice of America that the Russian-Cuban agreement is "a resumption of the Cold War in retaliation for recent moves by NATO and the United States with respect to Ukraine."
Republican political consultant
Alex Castellanos told the Post, “Weakness invites the wolves. This is a president whose naivete is dangerous, who sees the world as he wishes it were and not as it is.”
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