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LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic

November 17, 1981, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section A; Page 31, Column 2; Editorial Desk

LENGTH: 836 words

HEADLINE: GETTING CUBA

BYLINE: By William M. Leogrande

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

BODY:
Though the Ad- ministration has repeatedly threatened to contain the crisis in El Salvador by ''going to the source,'' President Reagan will find, as have six Presidents before him, that the military options available for use against Cuba are severely limited.

Among the options that Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. has asked the Pentagon to review, all entail considerable risk and promise meager benefits.

An invasion is almost unthinkable. Cuba is defended by a welltrained and well-equipped professional army of nearly 100,000 men and women, an equal number of reservists, and a militia of half a million people.

Invasion would require a military force so large that every other theater of operations, including Europe and the Persian Gulf, would have to be stripped of conventional forces. Moreover, an invasion would almost certainly produce a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

As the United States' threats toward Cuba have increased in number and intensity over the last nine months, the Soviet Union has repeatedly and explicitly warned the United States that Cuba is, in Leonid I. Brezhnev's words, ''an inseparable part of the Socialist community.'' An invasion of Cuba by the United States would be analogous, in its implications for world peace, to a Soviet invasion of West Berlin.

A naval blockade of Cuba akin to the one ordered by President John F. Kennedy during the missile crisis in 1962 has often been mentioned by officials in the Reagan Administration as an appropriate response to Cuban misbehavior in Central America.

Such a blockade, however, would entail many of the same risks and problems as an invasion. A full blockade would require a task force so large that United States naval forces worldwide would have to be depleted in order to assemble it. As in 1962, a blockade would require the United States to stop Soviet vessels in international waters, and this would lead to direct naval confrontation between the superpowers.

Before the United States seeks to relive the heroic days of the missile crisis, we should recall that our triumph in 1962 was largely a result of the 5-to-1 nuclear-weapons superiority over the Soviet Union that we then enjoyed. Now that the superpowers stand at relative nuclear parity, the Soviet Union is much less likely to capitulate in such a crisis.

One of the few remaining military options is to establish a limited blockade aimed at interdicting Cuban arms shipments to Nicaragua - that is, cutting off the channel through which Cuban arms purportedly flow to the guerrillas in El Salvador. This option offers several advantages to the Administration. It is less likely to provoke a confrontation with the Soviet Union, and it is more politically defensible both at home and abroad than either a punitive attack on Cuba or deeper United States military involvement in El Salvador.

But even a limited blockade would have its costs. It would shatter what little remains of the United States' relations with Nicaragua, and would give potent ammunition to radicals in the Sandinist regime who have long argued that the United States is an implacable enemy of their revolution. A blockade might also provide the rationale for a further crackdown on dissidents.

In addition, a blockade would pose the risk of military confrontation with Cuba - though to hear some Administration officials talk, they might view it less as a risk than a benefit.

The strongest argument against a limited blockade is not that its costs would be so great but that its benefits would be so meager. Even if Cuba is still supplying arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas - an issue upon which the United States intelligence community is divided -stopping the flow of arms is not going to stop the war. Since the guerrillas can supplement their already sizable arsenal with weapons captured from Salvadoran Government troops, the war probably could go on indefinitely even if the guerrillas received no significant aid from the outside.

The idea that El Salvador's armed forces can regain the upper hand if only the United States can halt Cuban interference is an illusion. The policy of ''going to the source'' is ultimately self-defeating because it ignores the real source of the Salvadoran civil war: decades of economic inequality, social injustice, and political oppression.

By ignoring the roots of the conflict, such a policy can offer no constructive means for resolving it.
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William M. LeoGrande, who is director of political science at the American University, is author, most recently, of ''Cuba's Policy in Africa, 1959-1980.''