Pyongyang caught off guard by Havana

Chang Se-jeong
The author is an editorial writer of the JoongAng Ilbo.

A historic announcement was recently made that South Korea and Cuba have agreed to establish diplomatic relations between the two hostile countries. The diplomatic ties appear more dramatic than the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and China in the 1990s. Some observers say that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un must have been shocked by this news more than his late grandfather Kim Il Sung was when Seoul and Beijing tied the diplomatic knot in 1992. Pyongyang seems to have suffered a serious internal injury given its silence on the development for more than three weeks since the announcement.

The history of exchanges between South Korea and Cuba dates back to 1921, when Korea was under the colonial occupation of Japan. In April 1905, 1,033 Koreans left Incheon Harbor to work at henequen haciendas in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Of them, 288 went to Cuba in March 1921 to make more money by working on sugar cane plantations. But after the price of sugar cane plummeted, they had to work at henequen farms to barely survive.

The Korean immigrants’ resilience in the face of hardships helped them take roots in the island nation. Today, about 1,000 Koreans are living in Cuba. Lim Cheon-taek (1903-1985), former head of the Korean residents’ association in Cuba, had once sent funds to the provisional government of Korea in China after collecting money from Korean workers in Cuba.

Even before the recent decision to establish diplomatic relations, the two countries had government-level exchanges. Cuba, which became independent from Spanish rule in 1898, recognized the South Korean government in 1949, but there were no official diplomatic relations. But Cuba was friendly to South Korea. During the 1950-53 Korean War, Cuba provided $270,000 in aid for the South. In 1957, then Cuban president Fulgencio Batista sent a delegation to South Korea and awarded his counterpart Syngman Rhee with a medal.

But the exchanges were severed after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara succeeded in the communist revolution in 1959. After Cuba established diplomatic relations with North Korea in 1960, Cuba has served as one of Pyongyang’s strategic bases of overseas diplomacy after China and Russia. Stressing the common ground of “anti-American socialism,” North Korea even offered 100,000 AK rifles to Cuba, which it called a “brother country.” Castro vowed to defend the socialist revolution with those guns, but the country was swept up in the turbulence of international politics after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The relations between South Korea and Cuba found a breakthrough after the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency opened a trade office in Havana in 2005. Korean products flowed into Cuba, and K-pop music and other cultural products were enthusiastically received by Cubans.

When the United States and Cuba established diplomatic relations in 2015 followed by U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Havana the following year, South Korea had an opportunity to normalize their diplomatic relations.

In 2016, Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se became the first South Korean foreign minister to visit Cuba, followed by his successor’s trip two years later, indicating that the timing was ripe for diplomatic relations. But the Trump administration’s economic sanctions on Cuba in 2019 — and its decision to relist the country as a state sponsor of terrorism in January 2021 — threw cold water on South Korea’s relations with Cuba.

Until now, the biggest obstacle to diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba was North Korea. Jolted by Cuba’s decision to tie a diplomatic knot with America, Pyongyang sent a large delegation of top officials to block the possibility of South Korea establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. After being cautious about North Korea, Cuba suddenly contacted South Korean officials on Feb. 7, and at the United Nations a week later, the two countries announced their agreement to establish ambassador-level diplomatic relations.

A former senior diplomat, who had participated in diplomatic efforts to establish relations with Cuba during the Park Geun-hye administration, attributed the change in Cuba’s attitude to “economic difficulties caused by the U.S. sanctions.” Indeed, Cuba’s ever-worsening economic conditions situation led to soaring prices and massive anti-government protests after the government’s failed currency reform in 2021.

Another former diplomat said, “Cuba apparently concluded that there is no reason to side with North Korea since Pyongyang recently defined inter-Korean relations as “between two hostile states” and “Cuba used the development as an opportunity to establish diplomatic relations with South Korea.” In other words, the radical shift in the North’s strategy toward the South backfired as he denied the same ethnicity of South and North Korean people and their ultimate unification. North Korea was caught off guard by Cuba.

North Korea will scramble to find a way out for some time, as implied by its sudden outreach to Japan and invitations of German, British, Swedish and Swiss diplomats for the first time since the pandemic. But such a stopgap measure cannot conceal the regime’s repeated failures and isolation. Only when North Korea learns a lesson from the courage and determination of Cuban leaders — who prioritized the people’s economy and embraced the flow of history — can the country find a way to survive.