In asking President Bush to use this week's summit to urge Mikhail Gorbachev to suspend Soviet aid to Cuba, members of Congress are doing the Soviet leader a favor.
Now Gorbachev would do himself and his country a favor by using this gentle prodding as an excuse to eliminate the $5.5 billion it has been sending Cuba each year in military and other assistance.After all, the Soviet Union could certainly use that money itself, particularly at a time of serious shortages and hoarding in anticipation of a possible switch to a more market-oriented economy.
Even without this economic pinch, it belies Gorbachev's professions of peace to keep pouring military aid into a Castro regime that still seeks to forcibly export communism to the rest of Latin America.
Besides, it must be awkward for Gorbachev to keep feeding the mouth that bites him. Castro is one of the few communist leaders in the world to openly sneer at the openness and restructuring advocated by Gorbachev. This stance puts Castro in league only with such extremely backward regimes as those in Albania and North Korea.
By continuing aid to Cuba, the Kremlin is propping up an economy that is even more backward and mismanaged than its own. Moreover, such aid puts Moscow in what should be the embarrassing position of subsidizing Cuba's systematic violation of human rights. Even such Soviet satellites as Bulgaria and Hungary have voted in the United Nations against Cuba on human rights issues.
No wonder that the continuation of Soviet aid to Cuba has been met with mounting criticism from the Soviet Union's own parliament.
In short, it will be hard to improve U.S.-Soviet relations as much as they should be as long as Moscow continues to subsidize in Cuba the type of aggression and repression that Gorbachev has promised to discard.