THE CASE OF CUBA AND THE NORTH KOREAN SHIP

JULY 19, 2013

THE CASE OF CUBA AND THE NORTH KOREAN SHIP
POSTED BY JON LEE ANDERSON

Diplomats have long employed disingenuous turns of phrase to avoid
conceding inconvenient and sometimes self-evident truths that could
compromise or embarrass their nations. While artfulness is preferred,
bald-faced lying is also part of the protocol. When the Russian foreign
minister, Sergei Lavrov, says, for instance, as he has been wont to over
the past year, that Russian arms shipments to Syria's Assad régime are
not offensive in nature and mere obligatory fulfillments of old standing
orders—made long before the country's civil war—he is, most likely, lying.

It is difficult to know, as yet, just why Cuba would have wished to
secretly load two MiG-21 fighter jets, fifteen MiG engines, and two
anti-aircraft missile systems of Soviet vintage onto a North Korean
cargo ship, the Chong Chon Gang, which then concealed that cargo
underneath ten thousand tons of Cuban brown sugar. But the explanation
that Cuba's foreign ministry quickly offered on Tuesday, a day after the
ship's dramatic seizure by suspicious Panamanian authorities at the
Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal, was somewhere between decidedly
strange and scarcely believable. The cargo was indeed Cuba's, said the
foreign-ministry communique, consisting of "obsolete defensive weapons"
which was being sent to North Korea for "repair." If the Chong Chon
Gang's mission was as prosaic as that, then it's captain certainly
overreacted when, as the Panamanians boarded his vessel, he attempted to
commit suicide by cutting his own throat, while his crewmen mounted a
resistance against their captors.

The Chong Chon Gang, it has emerged, is a known rogue ship, having been
stopped and searched with suspicious shipments on several other
occasions. In 2009, it was seen in the Russian naval base of Tartus, in
Syria. A year later, it was found to be carrying drugs in the Ukraine.
North Korea is known to operate a fleet of such ships; it is suspected
of using them to procure hard currency for Pyongyang by ferrying
black-market weapons here and there across the seas. There is also some
evidence to suggest that North Korea is on the prowl for missile
components, as part of its ongoing effort to build a missile system
capable of carrying one of its nuclear warheads. North Korea is subject
to U.N. sanctions for its nuclear-weapons and missile-development
programs, and so member states are prohibited from sending it missiles.
To wit, if Cuba's foreign-ministry statement were found to be untrue,
Cuba would be in flagrant violation of its obligations to the U.N. And
so the foreign-ministry communique contained a solemn reaffirmation of
Cuba's commitment to "peace, disarmament, including nuclear disarmament,
and respect for international law."

Panamanian authorities had become suspicious of the ship after it left
the Russian Pacific coast and, in June, passed through the Canal into
the Caribbean. It then disappeared. The ship's satellite tracking system
appears to have been switched off intentionally during the late stages
of its voyage to Cuba, its time in port there, and until its July 10th
reappearance at the Canal.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, in early July a high-level North Korean
military delegation visited the island and met with President Raúl
Castro. Cuba and North Korea may be fraternal powers, two of the world's
last officially declared Communist states, but it's still difficult to
comprehend why Cuba would risk the international position it has by
being caught out in a covert alliance with a nuclear rogue state. Could
Cuba be so cash-strapped that it has begun selling off part of its
Soviet-era arsenal to the North Koreans, or via the North Koreans to the
highest bidder?

Or might the Cuban foreign ministry's statement be truthful after all?
The one argument in its favor is that the world can sometimes be a very
weird place. In addition to offering a general description of the
weaponry it had sent away to be fixed, the communique went on to say:
"The agreements subscribed by Cuba in this field are supported by the
need to maintain our defensive capacity in order to preserve national
sovereignty." Publicly, the Panamanian government and others seem
willing to take Cuba at its word for the moment, with a straight face.

Source: "The Case of Cuba and the North Korean Ship : The New Yorker" -
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/07/the-case-of-cuba-and-the-north-korean-ship.html