Iran’s president visits Havana during Latin American swing

Ahmadinejad was scheduled to meet with Cuban leader Raúl Castro late Wednesday and was expected to also meet with Fidel Castro, an ally who declared in 2001 that “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees.”

The Iranian president is on a whirlwind tour of Latin America apparently designed to drum up support for his increasingly isolated nation. He has already visited Venezuela and Nicaragua and will spend 21 hours in Cuba before leaving Thursday for Ecuador.

After receiving an honorary doctorate in political science at the University of Havana, Ahmadinejad attacked the United States and paralleled Fidel Castro’s often-repeated argument that the capitalist model is on the wane.

“We are seeing that the capitalist system is in decline, in a dead-end alley,” he declared in his speech, according to news reports. “The world needs a new order or a new thinking that respects all human beings based on justice.”

He also repeatedly attacked other Western governments, but did not address the growing tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, which it claims is for peaceful purposes. Others suspect it is designed to produce atomic weapons.

Ahmadinejad’s visit to Cuba highlighted the long-time and close alliance between the two nations. Both governments were born out of revolutions and are powerfully anti-American, and both Iran and Cuba are on the U.S. list of countries that support international terrorism, along with Syria and Sudan.

Commercial relations between the two nations are minimal, and it appears that Tehran never really opened the $700 million line of credit for Cuba that Ahmadinejad approved some years back. The latest available official reports put total trade at $27 million in 2009, most of it apparently for 750 railroad cars that Cuba bought from Iran.

But political relations have been extremely close, with Tehran regularly attacking the U.S. embargo on Cuba and Havana regularly defending Iran’s nuclear program and opposing international sanctions on Tehran.

Fidel Castro has written several columns over the past few years predicting a nuclear war, to be precipitated by an Israeli or U.S. attack to destroy Iran’s atomic program. He also has criticized the Iranian president for denying the Holocaust.

Jaime Suchlicki, head of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami, said Ahmadinejad is touring Latin America because he “needs countries that can help Iran get around the sanctions.”

“But he’s also creating a club that tries to weaken the United States and attack the United States” using terrorist tactics, Suchlicki added. “This is not about Marxism. This is an anti-American ideology and a call to violence.”

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen alleged Wednesday that Iran and Cuba share intelligence information, “have clear intentions of harming the U.S.,’’ and “support extremist groups dedicated to bringing destruction to our nation.” The two countries, she added, “need to be treated as immediate threats to our national security.”

Ros-Lehtinen also mentioned Cuba’s sale of biotechnology to Iran in the 1990s, which sparked allegations that the technology could be used to produce and control the lethality of biological warfare agents. Havana and Tehran denied the accusations.

South Florida Republican Rep. Mario Diaz Balart called Ahmadinejad’s swing through Latin America a “Hate America tour.” He urged President Barack Obama to tighten sanctions on Iran and Cuba and “treat them like the enemies that they are.”

Ahmadinejad’s visit to Cuba even drew some opposition from Arturo Lopez-Levy, a Cuban academic at the University of Denver who is highly critical of U.S. policies toward the Castro government.

Lopez-Levy wrote in a column that Havana and Tehran differ greatly on many fronts, such as women’s rights and the Communist Party (outlawed in Iran), and that the Ahmadinejad visit was not a good idea because of the publicity it brought Cuba.

“Cuba, as a country blockaded by the most powerful nation on the planet, cannot afford the luxury of rejecting gestures from the Persian power,” he wrote. “But it should weigh the costs of generating offenses in the North American and international public opinion against a relationship whose dividends are very modest.”

“Ahmadinejad’s visit to Cuba, therefore, should have as low a profile as possible,” Lopez-Levy added, taking note of the $27 million trade figure. “If he wants more, let him pay for it.”