Cuba & Russia in Syria

Last month, we heard from Fox News and the Daily Beast that Cuba had sent forces to Syria.  Since then, almost nobody talks about it.  What is odd about that is while the U.S. encourages businesses to run into Cuba to prop up the regime, that same regime is sending troops into Syria to fight along side the Russians who actually transported them to fight there.  We have to wonder if the State Department, the Department of Commerce, and the White House talk.  They can get in the same room long enough to cancel the Keystone Pipeline, but can't seem to coordinate a strategy on Cuba that makes sense, given their involvement in Syria.  We sanction Russians for what they do in the Ukraine, but Syria is OK.

Russia and Cuba have been cooperating a long time in collecting intelligence on the U.S. and it goes back a long way.  Everyone has heard of Lourdes.  That SIGINT base was closed in 2001, and according to a Global Security report at http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/cuba/lourdes.htm
the Russians said they reopened it in July 2014.  Putin denies doing any such thing, and since he controls the press, we must wonder how they managed to publish this agreement between Russia and Cuba to open it back up.  Stuff happens.

When ABC News went to Cuba to show what new international relations  would do, they had the nerve to want to go aboard a Russian spy ship tied up at the same dock where the TV cameras disembarked.  Stuff happens.  The Russians pretended to be looking for a place to hide but were too late.  I somehow don't think that was an accident.  It is Putin's in-your-face style of diplomacy, which seems to work for him.  Now Cubans are in Syria fighting alongside their Russian friends.

Let's not be friends with the friends of our enemy.