Gorbachev and Castro to Match Wills at Talks

As he welcomes Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev today to what could become a testy match of wills, Cuban President Fidel Castro will open with his strongest card--his enormous personal popularity among Cubans and throughout the Third World, according to Havana-based diplomats.

“It’s going to be a tumultuous welcome, maybe the biggest ever extended here,” said a diplomat on the eve of the arrival of Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, whose earlier plan to visit Cuba last December had to be postponed because of the Armenian earthquake.

By deploying more than 500,000 flag-waving Cubans along the 18-mile motorcade route from the airport to Havana, the diplomat added, Castro means to give a living demonstration of the depth of his own personal power more than he means to flatter the Soviet leader, with whom he has been at odds.

Although neither Gorbachev nor Castro is considered likely to challenge the other publicly during the three-day visit, members of the Soviet leader’s advance party here already have signaled that Castro’s rejection of the Soviets’ glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) will get a thorough private airing.

The advance men’s first public act after flying from Moscow was to symbolically chide Castro by calling a press conference devoted to praising the progress of perestroika and the surprisingly democratic results of last week’s Soviet elections, both of which have been all but ignored by Castro’s state-run media.

But Nikolai I. Yefimov, deputy head of the ideology department in the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, made it clear that Gorbachev does not want to take the disagreement public.

“We believe that our objective is to learn from each other, not to teach each other,” he explained diplomatically when asked for Gorbachev’s reactions to Castro’s often-expressed scorn for the Soviet reforms. “They (Cuba) should take what is useful for them.”

Full Slate of Problems

The two Communist leaders have a full slate of other problems to discuss.

Chief among them, according to diplomats and Soviet analysts, is the crippled Cuban economy, which would collapse without Soviet assistance. Non-military aid to Cuba currently costs Moscow at least $5 billion a year, according to Washington experts who briefed Havana-bound reporters last week. In addition, the Soviets give Cuba military aid of about $1.5 billion a year.

Although Yuri V. Petrov, the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, said last week that “any reduction of aid is out of the question,” diplomats said Gorbachev, under severe economic pressure at home, will seek at least to restructure it so that it can be trimmed in the future.

Waste, Mismanagement Cited

Among other measures, according to both Western and Soviet diplomats, Gorbachev will ask Castro to reorganize parts of Cuba’s rigid bureaucracy in order to use the aid more efficiently. Leaders among the Soviet advisers here have made no secret of their annoyance over aid money wasted because of Cuban mismanagement.

Gorbachev also will insist on at least some perestroika- style changes that he wants all Communist Bloc countries to adopt in order to do business with newly autonomous Soviet enterprises emerging under the Soviet reforms, a diplomat said.

Cuba’s major export, sugar, may represent the knottiest problem to the new Soviet system, said an economic analyst here. By longstanding agreement, the Soviets subsidize Cuban sugar by paying as much as four times the world price, a total of more than $2 billion for virtually the entire crop each year.

Moscow also subsidizes Cuban oil imports, routinely oversupplying the island country so that Havana can earn hard currency by selling some of the Soviet-supplied oil on the world spot market.

“The new Soviet enterprises aren’t going to like selling products like oil at a subsidized price and buying products like sugar at a premium price,” one diplomat said.

The result of such imbalanced trade between the two Communist countries has been a Cuban trade deficit that some analysts estimate at $20 billion--now listed as debt owed to Moscow.

“Gorbachev may make a public show of forgiving that debt while he is here,” said a diplomat. “He knows he isn’t going to be paid anyway, and he can use the gesture as a wedge to demand debt forgiveness from the Western countries.”

Central American Policy

Of more immediate concern to the United States may be what the two leaders have to say to each other concerning Central America, where Castro, with Soviet encouragement, has been funding and advising the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and leftist insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala.

In Washington, Bush Administration officials said Saturday that Gorbachev may announce a dramatic cut in aid to Nicaragua during his visit but that it could turn out to be “a phony gesture.”

President Bush has been pressing Gorbachev to reduce economic and military aid to the Sandinista regime, estimated at $1 billion a year. However, U.S. officials now say they are worried that Gorbachev may take him up on the idea.

The problem, they said, is that Gorbachev could achieve a public relations coup by announcing a cut in the Soviets’ estimated $515 million in military aid to the Sandinistas without changing his overall policies in Central America.

“Gorbachev may well have made a decision that since the Sandinistas don’t face a 15,000-man army of Contras any more, they don’t need $500 million in military aid,” one senior Administration official said. “He could get up in Havana and announce that he’s cutting their military aid by 50%. But that doesn’t make any difference if the Soviet Union is still sending economic aid while Cuba and Nicaragua are subverting their neighbors.”

But Yefimov and Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Victor G. Komplektov made it clear when they arrived in Havana that Gorbachev would not respond to calls by Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III that he withdraw Soviet support from Nicaragua and apply “new thinking” to Central American issues.

“I’d say that the main responsibility is theirs (Washington’s),” Yefimov said.

Won’t Object to Contra Aid

The two Soviet officials did indicate that Moscow will not object to the recent White House-congressional agreement to keep funding the Nicaraguan Contras with $40 million of non-lethal aid.

Asked if Moscow can live with the new U.S. approach, Yefimov said, “I hope, if it doesn’t contradict agreements made by the Central Americans themselves.”

The new U.S. policy, stressing diplomatic over military approaches to Nicaragua, would keep the Contras together but not fighting until February, 1990, when Nicaraguan elections are to be held under a peace plan agreed upon by the Central American presidents.

After their arrival in Havana late this afternoon, the Gorbachevs will rest at a special guest residence before beginning separate busy schedules Monday. While Gorbachev lays a wreath at a monument to Cuban independence hero Jose Marti and begins several hours of official talks with Castro, Raisa Gorbachev will visit the Soviet-Cuba Friendship Assn., a day care center and the former home of American writer Ernest Hemingway, now a museum.

Her hostess will be Vilma Espin, wife of Fidel’s brother, Raul, who is Castro’s heir apparent and head of the Cuban armed forces. Vilma Espin often serves as Cuba’s First Lady because Fidel remains unmarried after an early divorce. As head of the Cuban Women’s Federation and a member of the Politburo of the Cuban Communist Party, she is probably the most powerful woman in Cuba.

MOSCOW’S MAN IN HAVANA Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev arrives in Havana today for three days of talks with Cuban President Fidel Castro on aid and trade relations with Cuba, and on conditions in Nicaragua, with which Moscow also has close ties. The U.S. government estimates Soviet aid to Cuba for the calendar year 1988 as: $5 billion economic aid. $1.5 billion military aid. In addition: 3,500 Soviet troops are stationed in Cuba. 10,000 Soviet civilian technical advisers and employees of joint ventures live in Cuba. Corresponding figures for Soviet aid to Nicaragua in 1988: $515 million military aid $490 million economic aid. About 50 Soviet military advisers are in Nicaragua. About a dozen civilian advisers are also stationed in the Central American country. SOURCES: State, Defense and Commerce departments