Julia Sweig, Director for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, remembers encountering three brands on her first trip to Cuba in 1984: Copelia ice cream, Popular brand cigarettes, and Fidel Castro. No matter the leader’s refusal to build statues and other monuments to himself, “The revolution didn’t need to remind Cubans of who ran the show. For nearly  half a century, Fidel was ubiquitous.” Today’s Cuba is different and has, Sweig writes in Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, “in many ways become unrecognizable,” hosting a consumer culture and service sector, and most noticeably, losing the presence of Fidel. In her cleanly written new book, organized into dozens of questions and answers, Sweig explains Cuba, past, present, and future. In the excerpt below, Sweig explores some of the more worrisome questions about the country’s ties in Latin America and with Russia, China, and Iran.

What are the principal features of Cuba’s ties with Latin America today?

Cuba maintains active and extensive relations with a diverse array of Latin American countries, encompassing significant trade, investment, scholarly, and cultural links. As in the past, Cuba continues to provide significant humanitarian assistance to the region, especially in the aftermath of natural disasters and for basic public health needs and education. Cuba’s revolutionary model may no longer be seen by many in the hemisphere as a practical example to follow as it once was. Still as a result of Cuba’s extensive efforts cultivating ties through public diplomacy and foreign aid, today Cuba finds itself with many friends in Latin America at every level of society, from social activists to the highest officials in government and business – and not just on the Left.

In Central America, Cuba maintains proper diplomatic ties with every government, including Costa Rica and El Salvador. Havana also continues close relations with the Left political parties it once supported when they were conducting armed insurgencies, but takes great pains not to be perceived as interfering in their domestic affairs. In Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega was reelected in 2006, Cuba has discovered a much-changed old friend, while in Panama, Havana has rebuilt ties after a long period of dormancy. While simultaneously maintaining close ties to Washington, the Panamanian government could request the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban exile terrorist, after the country’s Supreme Court found that Posada’s pardon in 2004 by then-president Mireya Moscoso was unconstitutional.

After Fidel’s fallout with Vicente Fox and the near-total rupture in relations, Cuba’s ties with Mexico have undergone a significant turnaround. Indeed, Raul Castro and current Mexican President Felipe Calderón have gone to considerable lengths to put the nastiness behind them. In addition to reviving trade and diplomatic ties across the board, the two countries negotiated a migration agreement to deal with the sharp surge in Cuban migrants being smuggled illegally through Mexico en route to the United States.

Together, Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, more recently joined by Nicaragua and the island of Dominica, have formed the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), an attempt to create an alternative trade bloc of sorts to the free trade agreement the United States has negotiated with a number of Latin American countries. Yet despite ambitious plans for cooperation in energy cooperation, education, development financing, and telecommunications, currently the agreement is not much more than barter and rhetoric, with Venezuela footing the bill. In the Andean region, Cuba has proper ties with Peru’s Alan García, who has left behind his Populist presidency of the 1980s and now leads a center-right government in Lima. In Bolivia, indigenous President Evo Morales’s ties with Fidel and Cuba go back nearly two decades. Not surprisingly, Cuba has provided significant public health aid, educational support, and other technical assistance to his government. In the case of Colombia, where Fidel as a student in 1948 first experienced Latin America’s violent politics, Cuba maintains cordial and professional relations with the government of Alvaro Uribe, despite clear ideological differences. In part as an outgrowth of Castro’s abiding and close personal friendship with Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Havana continues to host peace talks between the government and the ELN rebels (a guerilla movement inspired, at least initially, by Cuba’s own) while pushing privately and publicly for the FARC (a more powerful leftist insurgency) to get out of the business of drugs, kidnapping, and terrorism.

In the Southern Cone, the governments of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil are each led by individuals or political parties with deep ties to Cuba and, in some cases, to Fidel Castro personally. Most notably, and as referenced at various points earlier in this section, under Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil significantly expanded its engagement with Cuba at the same time that it developed what Brazilian diplomats describe as its best relationship ever with the United States under George W. Bush. Fidel and Lula have known one another for over two decades (Fidel helped Lula and  a handful of his comrades from the Worker’s Party [PT] as Brazil was beginning its transition from years of military rule and repression to democracy). In 2008 Lula made one of the few publicly announced visits with Fidel since the illness, offering Havana $1 billion in credits to finance food purchases, housing, oil and mineral exploration, and a number of other ventures. A few months later, Brazil’s foreign minister arrived in Havana with a planeload of businesspeople and announced his country’s desire to become Cuba’s number one commercial partner, moving beyond current trade in food, agricultural machinery, transportation equipment, tobacco, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. Cuba and Brazil signed 10 bilateral cooperation agreements in science, technology, development, and social programs. As they open offices around the country, Brazilian companies are likely to soon step up investments in petroleum exploration, mining, infrastructure, and agriculture. Significantly, an despite Fidel Castro’s public critiques of the ethanol industry as a threat to food security (made public after Brazil and the United States signed an alternative energy cooperation deal), Lula and Raul Castro may be moving to revive Cuba’s sugar industry with an eye toward eventual ethanol production. Moreover, given recent oil discoveries of as much as 1 billion barrels off its coast, Brazil may become a potential source of imported oil for Cuba in the long term, helping to relieve some measure of the island’s dependence on Venezuela.

Brazil’s multidimensional approach to Cuba balances that of Venezuela. In late 2007, Hugo Chávez lost a referendum on measures extending executive authority. But in early 2009, he won passage of a referendum amending the constitution to allow him to be reelected in 2013 when his current term ends. Although oil prices had by then declined to their 2004 levels, and Venezuelans braced themselves for some domestic spending cuts, there is no evidence that Cuba’s ties to Venezuela are in jeopardy. On the contrary, Cuba’s ties to Venezuela have boomed since 2006, with some 300 cooperation projects and 30 joint venture operations currently on the books, including a $5 billion petrochemical complex currently under construction in Cienfuegos near the refurbished oil refinery (also brought online with Venezuela’s help), as well as ample assistance for hurricane relief and reconstruction.

Until nearly the end of the 1990s, most Latin American governments were inclined to publicly endorse, if not always privately embrace, the United States’ emphasis on the need to promote democracy and human rights in Cuba. Indeed, with many Latin American countries struggling throughout that decade to overcome the legacies of human rights abuse at the hands of a repressive state and by state-sponsored death squads (some of which still operate in the region), there was and still is a measure of hope among some in the region that Cuba can one day become a more open and democratic society as well. Yet by and large, Latin Americans do not see the Cuban case as directly parallel to the military dictatorships they themselves endured. Moreover, they are loath to support a democratization campaign guided by an interventionist ethos whose principle cheerleader is the United States. Indeed the United States can hardly claim to have been a consistent champion of democracy or human rights in the hemisphere, having tolerated for most of the 20th century the suppression of both in the name of national security. Today, Latin America’s democratic consolidation has advanced to a point where the United States can no longer say or do much to fundamentally shape the region’s political landscape. The loss of American hegemony in Latin America, let alone the Bush administration’s disastrous experiments with democracy promotion by force in the Middle East, have clearly signaled that there are limits to imposing one brand or another of democracy on a neighboring country. And whatever the island’s faults, Cuba’s symbolic and tangible commitment to social justice (even within a framework of low-intensity repression) remains a potent reminder of Cuban exceptionalism that resonates with public opinion in the region as a whole. As a result, whether or not they share deep historic ties to Fidel’s revolution, and regardless of the extent to which they admire Cuba’s closed domestic political model (most do not), Latin American governments today generally see gradual reform  under Raul as the path most likely to bring about a more plural, open society on the island but also maintain the stability necessary to keep the United States at arm’s length. And they have begun to call directly – in private and public – for Washington to find a new, sanctions-free modus Vivendi with Havana.

How has Cuba expanded its ties with Russia, China, and Iran?

As part of its efforts to diversify its diplomatic and trade portfolio, Cuba has increased cooperation with Russia, China, and Iran in recent years. Under Vladimir Putin, diplomacy between Moscow and Havana has yielded debt forgiveness, modest trade ties, financing for Cuba to purchase Russian commercial airplanes, weekly Havana-Moscow flights, some common positions against the United States, hurricane assistance by the planeload, a modest level of family and cultural ties that continue from the Soviet era, and high-level, high-profile diplomatic visits. For China, Cuba is a small piece of a much larger Latin American strategy of investment, commodity, energy, and natural resource accumulation. China has become Cuba’s second largest trading partner, exporting electronics, buses, trains, light manufactured goods, and now tourists as well. Joint ventures in nickel extraction, onshore oil exploration, and biotechnology are under way. Renovations of China’s embassy in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood are expanding the complex to occupy an entire city block. Historical ties bind the two countries as well: Chinese laborers settled in Cuba beginning in 1847, working predominantly on sugar plantations, and today 1% of Cubans on the island have Chinese family roots. Ties between Cuba and Iran picked up following a visit to Havana by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami in 2000 and a visit by Fidel to Tehran the next year. Cooperation in science and biotech expanded, prompting the Bush administration to unsuccessfully argue that Cuba had the intention of exporting bioweapons to a rogue regime. Joint ventures and cooperation have expanded, with Cuba selling vaccines, medical services, and medical training to Iran, while Iran in exchange has provided Cuba with a modest line of credit for trade. The two countries have found common cause in their fight against American imperialism and aggression at the UN and most recently in 2006, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended the Non-Aligned Movement’s summit in Havana.

*Photo courtesy Marc Lippe.