North Korea falls back on close ties with Cuba

It makes a great deal of sense for the Pyongyang regime to attempt to reinforce the bonds that exist in whatever ways possible

n the midst of increasing international isolation, North Korea is sending its foreign minister to an old ally: Cuba. In a short message, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency announced that Ri Yong-ho and his delegation departed on their journey to Havana.

The move comes after a number of North Korean trading partners announced that they would be suspending trade with North Korea. Pyongyang’s seventh-largest trading partner, Singapore, announced that it would halt its trade ties with the country on Thursday. In September, the Philippines — North Korea’s fifth-largest trading partner — said it would do the same.

In purely economic terms, Cuba is probably of negligible importance to North Korea compared to these nations: Official figures show that Havana fails to crack the top 10 trading partners and it certainly falls far behind China, North Korea’s most important economic ally.

But at this point, Pyongyang may be hoping to shore up international partners wherever it can.

Notably, the move also comes at a time of increasing tension between Cuba and the US following the Obama administration attempt at normalisation of relations with Havana from 2014 onward. For Havana and Pyongyang, warm relations are nothing new. Cuba and North Korea came to be allies during the early days of the Cold War — Che Guevara, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary who played a key role in Cuba’s revolution, visited North Korea in 1960 and praised Kim Il-sung’s regime as a model for Cuba to follow.

Even after the Cold War ended, the two nations, now both isolated internationally, kept up their ties: Cuba also remains one of the few countries in the world to not have diplomatic relations with South Korea, for example.

The two nations were willing to flout sanctions to work together economically. In July 2013, a North Korea-flagged vessel was seized by Panamanian authorities carrying suspected missilesystem components hidden under bags of sugar upon its return from Cuba. A report released the following year by a UN panel of experts concluded that the shipment had violated sanctions placed on North Korea, though Cuban entities were not sanctioned in the aftermath despite protests from the US.

Crucially, the thawing of ties with Washington didn’t seem to damage the relationship significantly: In December 2016, a North Korean delegation to the funeral of Cuban leader Fidel Castro emphasised that the two nations should develop their relations “in all spheres” — a comment echoed by Raul Castro, according to state media reports at the time.

Since US President Donald Trump took office in January, there have been signs that the thaw with Cuba is over. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced tough restrictions on US travel and trade with Cuba, a move that largely followed through on Trump’s campaign promise to “terminate” the Obama-era normalisation with Cuba.

Any sign of warming relations between Cuba and North Korea will probably also draw the attention of the Trump administration, who have used the US’ economic clout to push a variety of nations to stop their illicit economic relationship with Pyongyang. Although Cuba’s official economic ties with North Korea remain small, some experts have suggested that these figures should be taken with a grain of salt.

Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.