Cuba:

In a speech to NATO ministers in Copenhagen last week, Secretary of State James Baker asked why the Soviets, if they are so hard pressed, keep sending billions of dollars in aid to Cuba. The answer is that Moscow's aid is not what it used to be. In decades past, the Soviet Union provided Cuba with 90% of its oil at rates well below the world price and threw in extra supplies for the Cubans to resell for hard currency. Moscow also bought Cuban sugar at three to five times the world levels and supplied military hardware free. The total package used to be worth at least $5 billion a year.

Those days are gone with perestroika. Like its trade with the former Comecon countries of Eastern Europe, Moscow's deals with Havana are now on a hard- currency basis at prevailing world prices. Under a 1991 agreement worth $3.8 billion, the Soviet Union is to deliver 70 million bbl. of oil to Cuba and, in exchange, receive 4 million tons of sugar, plus citrus fruit, nickel and medical supplies.

Though the bookkeeping is in dollars, the deal is still mainly barter, and prices are adjusted by exchanging different quantities. For example, the Soviets now pay 18 instead of 27 bbl. of oil for a ton of Cuban sugar. Moscow still delivers military and industrial equipment free, but no one is quite sure what it is worth. Western intelligence agencies price it at about $1 billion a year, but as Cuba's Deputy Foreign Minister, Jose Raul Viera, once described it, the equipment is "junk no one buys."

Anatoly Bekarevich, vice president of the Latin America Institute in Moscow, says it is "a great fantasy" to think aid to Cuba has much effect on the Soviet economy. "What we give Cuba is a drop in the sea," he says. It is also apparently beyond the Soviet Union's present capabilities. Last year Moscow promised to deliver 100 million bbl. of oil but managed only 70 million. For 1991 the Soviets are to match the 70 million, but Cuban trade experts doubt it will happen. "We can no longer count on them," says a senior official in Havana.

After dismantling most of the Soviet empire around the world, Gorbachev is reluctant to offer ammunition to his hard-line opponents at home by cutting ties to Cuba. With its listening post in Lourdes, the island continues to offer some strategic value to Moscow, though satellites and the end of the East-West cold war have diminished its importance.

Anticipating that Soviet largesse will eventually dry up altogether, the Cubans have begun to look elsewhere for help. Thanks to a law on joint ! ventures, West Europeans are pouring millions of dollars into the Cuban tourist industry, building luxury oceanside hotels. The Soviets now tell the U.S. that the sooner it lifts its trade embargo against Cuba, the sooner perestroika and demokratizatsiya will arrive on the island.