China does not need Cuba at all in its present-day dynamics

February 22, 2018

By Beatriz De Majo

El Nacional, February 21, 2018

Bilateral relations between Cuba and China are surely the oldest in the continent from a formal point of view. Cuba was the first country in the continent to establish relations with the People’s Republic of China, and that led to strong historic ties and to the Cuban market to become one with some strategic significance for China’s presence in the Caribbean. Not much else.

The size and the structure of the island’s economy are not enough for trade relations to be significant in volume and Cuba has very little to offer China, besides becoming a political ally from which to cast some Chinese influence throughout the rest of the continent. For Cuba, relations with China are in effect, important in numbers. It is by far the first supplier of the consumer goods that are found in the country. Inversely, China buys almost nothing from Cuba, simply because Cuba produces nothing. As a tourism enclave it does not have much to offer the Asian country’s citizens either. Bilateral trade is just over one billion dollars and China triples Cuba in sales.

For the past two decades, Cuba´s useful collusion with Chavista and now Madurista Venezuela has resulted in the island’s attention being fully focused on a preferred relationship with the Venezuelan benefactor government. In the first place, Havana has a decisive influence on the revolutionary government for spreading its leftist and totalitarian thesis and in the second place, it obtains a substantial array of economic perks and political protection on which the Cuban government rests for its survival and support.

Nevertheless, with some sound discretion level, the Castro brothers did not waste the opportunity to closely relate to the United States during Barack Obama’s government and established another perverse collusion with the north based on the promise of a slow departure from the asphyxiating communism of the past years. China never saw with sympathy Cuba’s rapprochement with Washington during the years China was beginning to focus on its worldwide supremacy.

Once Havana’s crush on Washington was left behind in this new Trump era and once the Venezuelan government began to wane, which critically deprived Cuba of economic support, the eyes of the island’s leaders have turned to China to make themselves evident, to claim their tiny bit of silk and to pursue a place in the substantial program and on the route to international cooperation.

Nothing leads to think that the present situation of Cuba’s relationship with China will transform itself or that the island will manage to receive a better attention than the one it receives from China today. What Xi tries to obtain through the macro project designed four years ago which is making undoubted progress in many regions throughout the planet is the path toward global development in which China will have a decisive supremacy as the world’s first power.

And the truth is that China does not need Cuba at all in its present-day dynamics.