Kremlin Conservatives Call Bush a Meddler on Cuba : Summit: Old Guard Communists are rankled by the President’s suggestion that aid to Castro be sharply cut.

Top-ranking Communist conservatives, making no secret of their displeasure Friday over positions taken by President Bush at the superpower summit, rejected as blatant meddling the U.S. leader’s call for big cuts in Soviet aid to Cuba.

“I can tell you straightforwardly that we see no reason for revising our relations of friendship and cooperation with any state, first and foremost with a state that is our longtime friend,” Prime Minister Valentin A. Pavlov said. “No one has the right to interfere in our bilateral cooperation in the development of our economies.”

The top-ranking Communist Party official in the Soviet military, Army Lt. Gen. Mikhail S. Surkov, a member of the Politburo, told a news conference, called to discuss the position of Communists in the armed forces, that Bush had exceeded the bounds of diplomatic propriety.

“Such a fine politician as Mr. Bush permitted himself several disrespectful or untactful statements toward the Soviet Union when he dictated some of his conditions--’If you stop your aid to Cuba, if you give freedom to the Baltics.’ But wait a second,” the general said. “Nobody dictated conditions to Mr. Bush when he made his decisions on the Persian Gulf, on Panama, etc. We wouldn’t allow ourselves to do that.”

In his most important speech on U.S.-Soviet relations during the two-day summit in Moscow, Bush on Tuesday proclaimed that the United States is not threatening Cuba and said there is no reason for the Soviet government to funnel an estimated $1.5 billion in military aid annually to Fidel Castro’s regime.

However, for die-hard Soviet Communists, who witnessed the downfall of their Eastern European comrades and are now challenged by other political creeds at home, the ferociously anti-capitalistic and anti-American Castro is a friendly and familiar face in an increasingly hostile world.

Likewise, aiding Cuba is a vivid way to demonstrate that the Soviet Union, now preoccupied with its own domestic problems, is still a bona fide superpower with the resolve and means to help its friends, as well as to challenge its adversaries, worldwide.

The leadership of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, which is clearly impatient with Castro’s anti-reform policies, has tried to change the rules of Soviet-Cuban economic exchanges with a trade pact signed in January that rights imbalances created by large-scale Soviet purchases of Cuban sugar at prices favorable to the Havana government, and the cut-rate sale of Soviet oil.

In consequence, Cuba’a economy, the recipient of about $5 billion annually in Soviet aid and already reeling from the effects of the political upheaval in Eastern Europe, has been floored. This spring, Castro said Soviet oil deliveries had been cut by 25% and that Cuba was having trouble getting spare parts for machinery supplied by its former East Bloc allies.

Acknowledging that major difficulties exist, Pavlov said, “It is true that our cooperation has very serious troubles this year, and these have to be put right and developed further.

” . . . This does not mean that we should cut our links and interaction, but rather change the mechanism which leads to a distorted presentation of our economic ties,” the Soviet prime minister added as he spoke at a news conference with visiting Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Markovic.