Panama’s interdiction last month of a North Korean cargo ship carrying 240 tons of aging armaments from Cuba including two MiG-21 fighter jets, two anti-aircraft systems, nine missiles and 15 additional MiG-21 engines all hidden under sacks of Cuban sugar have led observers to wonder who the weapons were really intended for.

A United Nations Security Council investigation is now likely to take place, which could result in both countries being found to have violated an arms embargo against North Korea. Those sanctions were imposed to try to force North Korea’s secretive rulers to give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

On July 26, in a letter marking the 60th anniversary of the Moncada attack in Santiago de Cuba, former President Fidel Castro said allegations Cuba was trying to defy UN sanctions against Pyongyang amount to “slander against our revolution.”

Yet many experts find the regime’s explanation that the weapons were sent to North Korea for “repairs” difficult if not impossible to accept, given that Korean technicians could have been flown to Havana to conduct such work, or such weapons could have been shipped to Russia, their country of origin.

“Cuba’s claim that North Korea is doing repairs for them is iffy, except that it is difficult to see what it would get out of the deal otherwise,” said James Hardy, Asia-Pacific editor of London-based Jane’s Defence Weekly, which covers the global arms trade.

“DPRK [North Korea] is very short of hard cash, so a barter deal it gets sugar and MiG-21 parts in return for SAM upgrades may be a good option.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation, in an op-ed posted on its website, said “the interception of a North Korean ship believed to be carrying missiles, jets, and other weapons from Cuba through the Panama Canal should be a wakeup call for the Obama administration as it resumes migration talks with Cuban officials for the first time since 2011.”

It added: “The incident illustrates the wrong-headedness of the Obama administration’s warming relations with the Castro regime. The administration seems to have forgotten that the source of lack of progress in Cuban-American relations is the regime in Havana, which is hopelessly wedded to the Communist political economic model.”

Given the often murky world of arms trading, where falsified paperwork and diverted shipments are part of the business, some speculate that Pyongyang could have planned to resell at least some of the Cuban weapons to various international buyers.

Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, leans toward that theory. He bases his belief on comments made by Héctor Igarza, director of the Sub-Saharan Department at Cuba’s Foreign Ministry, and on a September 2011 meeting in Havana between Raúl Castro and Congolese President Joseph Kabila.

Suchlicki admitted to CubaNews that such an assessment “is still speculation.”

As the Associated Press has reported, North Korea is barred by the UN from buying or selling arms, missiles or components, but for years UN and independent arms monitors have discovered North Korean weaponry headed to Iran, Syria and a host of nations in Africa and Asia. North Korea also has a thriving sideline in repairing aging Warsaw Pact gear, often in exchange for badly needed commodities, such as Burmese rice.

“They don’t know how to grow rice, but they know how to repair radars,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association a private group dedicated to promoting arms control told AP.

“The North Koreans are taking desperate measures to pursue that work,” he said. “Despite the best efforts of the international community to cut off arms transfers to and from North Korea, it will continue in some form.”

Indeed, Pyongyang has a long track record of peddling arms to African armies in the past.

“[There] were North Korean shipments to Congo in 2008 and 2009 of engines for T-54 and T-62 tanks and BMP-2 and BTR-60 APCs, along with later arrangements for the ‘refurbishment’ of some artillery and mortar pieces in Congo,” said Hardy.”

Aside from the positive diplomatic relations that Cuba has with the Kabila regime in Kinshasa, it is not known for being caught up with that country’s internal affairs. However, Cuba’s support for the neighboring Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) is well-documented and goes back to the 1960s and 1970s, when it supported black independence struggles in various African countries from Angola to Guinea-Bissau).

The use of MiG-21 fighter jets in Africa’s many internal civil conflicts can’t be brushed off. During Congo (Brazzaville)’s civil strife in 1997, waged by then-former ruler Sassou-Nguesso’s militia against then-President Pascal Lissouba, rebels used MiG-21 fighters and SA-7 MANPADS against the government’s beleaguered forces. 

Meanwhile, Cuba expert Arturo López Levy of the University of Denver says his country will have to deal with the diplomatic fallout over this scandal.

“I don’t think the UN would challenge Cuba’s version about their reasons for shipping the arms to the DPRK,” he said. “It is not the role of an ad hoc committee to second guess a government’s argument, and the experts don’t need it for a case against the shipment. It is already evident that there is a violation of UN Resolution 1718.”