surviving head of state. The majority of the
Cuban people have known no other leader; a kind
of national monument in the new century. For a
number of reasons the justification for not nor-
malising relations with Cuba has become increas-
ingly less persuasive. The continuing US trade
embargo injuring Cuba fails to serve any good
purpose. In any case it has become a sieve, loop-
holes allow US companies to export food to Cuba
and tourism flourishes. Some forty per cent of its
trade is conducted with the European Union
alone. Realities have encouraged both the US and
the European Union to open diplomatic missions
in Cuba. In Latin America during the last half
century human rights abuses were committed by
governments, recognised and even supported by
Western countries including the US, with records
worse than Cuba’s. Castro will not live forever.
Change will inevitably come to Cuba in the
twenty-first century, but it will be brought about
not by foreign intervention but by the masses dis-
contented with their low standard of living and
repression.
Once the immediate crisis was over in 1962, the
rest of the world debated a new question: was it
really safe to rely on the Soviet Union and the US
in relation to questions vital to the superpowers’
own security and well-being? Indeed, would the
US and the Soviet Union, whatever they said,
really risk a holocaust of their own peoples for the
defence of others? Two nations, China and
France, openly defied the superpowers and built
up their own nuclear-missile forces. Neither
accepted the policeman role of the USSR and the
US in the world; Mao sought to develop inde-
pendent Asian policies, and de Gaulle to construct
a European role while he denounced US domin-
ance. Britain was punished for its pretensions and
its ‘subservience’ to the US by de Gaulle’s veto
of its application to join the European Common
Market. But successive British governments have
essentially followed de Gaulle’s nuclear policy by
insisting on the preservation of an independent
nuclear-strike capacity, even though it has relied
on US missiles. There was much national postur-
ing, but NATO continued to be regarded as
essential for Western defence.
In fact, only the Soviet Union was able to
block nuclear proliferation – among its own
Warsaw Pact allies. West Germany and Japan did
not attempt to join the race. The spread of know-
ledge could not be prevented and the profit
motive ensured that ‘peaceful’ nuclear reactors
were exported from the advanced nations to the
Second and Third World. Plutonium for weapons
could be made by these reactors, as India demon-
strated when it exploded a bomb in May 1974.
West Germany has supplied reactors to Brazil; the
US has supplied them to Egypt and Israel; France
to South Africa, Iraq and South Korea; Canada
to the Argentine.
There is no certainty how many countries,
besides the core nuclear-weapon nations – the
US, the USSR, Britain, France and China – plus
India, Pakistan, South Africa (which has given
them up) and Israel (which has not yet tested any)
are able to make their own. Nations with the
capacity include Chile, North Korea, Argentina,
Brazil, Israel and, until the second Gulf War, Iraq.
Nuclear non-proliferation has failed, and there are
many fingers on the nuclear trigger now. The cer-
tainty that these terrible weapons cannot be used
without risk of self-destruction has so far pre-
served the world. The forty-year threat of nuclear
war between the US and the Soviet Union was
finally lifted by the demolition of the Berlin Wall
and the end of the Cold War.576 WHO WILL LIBERATE THE THIRD WORLD? 1954–68
Cuba – 2000Population Gross Domestic GDP per head,
(million) Product (US$ 1,000 Purchasing
million) Power Parity (US$)
11.2 19.0 1,700