Viator

A Russian oil tanker moves slowly past the sixteenth-century Spanish castle guarding the narrow entrance to Havana harbor. Castle and tanker symbolize dominion, but of very different kinds. To the Spaniards, Cuba was first and foremost a source of wealth-its own wealth and the wealth of Latin America to which it held the strategic key. To the Russians, it represents an economic loss on the order of some $350 to $400 million a year. The payoff for them is in the coin of political strategy: an extension of the frontiers of communism to the Western Hemisphere.