In a confidential report to his revolutionary government, then anxious to be accepted by the USSR as a “socialist-oriented” regime and thus obtain Soviet security and defense umbrella commitments as Cuba did, the Grenadian ambassador to the Soviet Union disappointedly but lucidly warned that Moscow still perceives the Caribbean area as a “distant one” and “of a low priority” despite the geostrategic value of the Cuban asset.If this is correct—and the American-led invasion of Grenada certainly seemed to prove it—the meaning of the East-West component of the present Caribbean crisis is clear. When there is a strong U.S. response—as in Grenada—in the global geopolitical game between the two superpowers, attempts by Moscow to test U.S. reactions to Soviet initiatives creating “communist beachheads” and “potential poles” for the regional expansion of Soviet-Cuban influence in the Caribbean are not likely to degenerate into a direct U.S.-USSR confrontation.
In the light of its global interest, Moscow prefers to back down and keep quiet (if not silent), paralleling the way in which it correctly expects the United States to back down and keep quiet (if not silent) each time a country in the Soviet “periphery” is at stake. Moscow was right about this in the case of Afghanistan and Poland. Preserves do exist for both sides by a tacit agreement, and events like the 1962 missile crisis are unlikely to recur.
The Caribbean crisis will therefore remain predominantly anchored in the North-South problematic and will increasingly depend on the quality of hemispheric relations. In that perspective, the Caribbean shares with Latin America the same “southern” position vis–a–vis the “northern” United States. Can the Caribbean, on the ground of that common denominator, be assimilated to, integrated into, or identified with Latin America? Or, rather, is there going to be an increasing Caribbean differentiation, emphasizing its own specificity and/or searching for broader horizons? To try to answer that topical question, one has to decipher a puzzling set of contradictory elements: the positive and negative ingredients of Caribbean-Latin American relations.
