TAIPEI. China usually calls him “good brother, good comrade, good friend.” But, perhaps for the first time, sparks can be seen in the relationship with Cuba. Despite the theoretical ideological alignment, given the long mutual communist experience, Havana does not appear to be one of the priorities of Beijing’s foreign policies between the Caribbean and Latin America. According to the Financial Times, a sense of mistrust is now spreading between the two “comrades”linked to Cuba’s lack of market-oriented economic reforms. A step that China has been taking for a long time now, since the 1980s with the era of Deng Xiaoping’s great opening. Those were the times when the “little helmsman” said that “getting rich is glorious”, launching an ambitious economic plan. The program was then relaunched in the 1990s with a flurry of privatization and a path mapped out to join the World Trade Organization. Today China adopts, as often happens, a peculiar melting pot between capitalism and socialism, but asks its partners to move closer to the market economic model.
Cuba, however, remains anchored to a highly vertically planned economy, despite various internal problems. Among the casus belli is the production of sugar, which has always been a critical industry for the Cuban economy. Well, after the Covid-19 pandemic, production collapsed to the lowest levels in more than a century: there is barely enough sugar to cover internal needs. This resulted in the breaking of a long-standing agreement to export 400 thousand tons of sugar per year to China. And the Caribbean island is starting to discover that China is not a “good-natured dad” who continues to make wasted investments. It is true that in the past Beijing contributed to the energy revolution promoted by Fidel Castro at the end of the 20th century, as well as to infrastructure reform in recent years, with particular emphasis on cybersecurity, digital technologies and transportation equipment. But, at the same time, the Financial Times warns that Havana is in debt of several hundred million dollars to large Chinese companies such as Huawei and Yutongwho provided it with vehicles, machinery and technology without ever being able to fully collect the accumulated credits.
Cuba is thus falling in China’s order of priorities in Latin America. Trade between Beijing and the region has grown more than tenfold in the last two decades and continues to increase: the Asian giant is now firmly the area’s second largest trading partner, after the United States. But the import of Chinese goods to Cuba fell from $1.7 billion in 2017 to $1.1 billion in 2022. Of the $160 billion invested by China in Latin America and the Caribbean between 2005 and 2020, only a small percentage reportedly went to Cuba.
And to think that just a few months ago it seemed that China was expanding its influence on the country. A summer 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report claims that Cuba is building a new radar site capable of spying on the nearby U.S. Guantanamo Bay naval base, with possible access granted to Beijing. A scenario feared by Washington, because it would provide its first global rival with the possibility of garrisoning a highly strategic observation point. Sugar permitting.
