Trying to keep my reasoning succinct in order to avoid writing a wall of text:
The soviets were geographically blocked from this being an option
Similarly for Vietnam for different reasons
Cuba doesn’t have the option of dedicating the requisite amount resources(and has the misfortune of being an island next to the most powerful current naval power)
China has the geography to become a great naval power. Sure, it doesn’t have both coasts. It has land connections that led to the Silk Road being a thing on the other, possibly a greater advantage.
They are building up militarily, and seem to be advancing commercial maritime pursuits on this well.
Thoughts?
i dont mean it in the sense that krushchev didn't care about naval power it's just that in the stalin era there was the idea that they could challenge the usn through conventional naval power of their own 1. there's a krushchev quote where he said that 'we don't need aircraft carriers, only the americans needed that type of ship'. kuznetsov for example got sacked by krushchev mostly because he was such a great advocate of a substantial soviet surface fleet.
1though the assumption was always that they would be operating along with land-based air coverage.
Not going to lie, the context you added (which I am thankful for) makes it even more damning.short sighted as fuck
The USSR could never compete with the combined NATO surface fleets. (USN+RN alone was massive) Simply not enough resources could be possibly dedicated to it, the Atlantic powers had been building ships for centuries. Submarines were the right call for the USSR, there it was possible to achieve an asymmetric advantage.
This is what Khrushchev (who I admit was usually a hare-brained oaf, but he made sense here) said about it: "The Americans had a mighty carrier fleet - no one could deny that. I'll admit I felt the nagging desire to have some in our own navy, but we couldn't afford to build them. They were simply beyond our means. Besides, with a strong submarine force, we felt able to sink the American carriers if it came to war"
from a purely nerd perspective khrushchev cancelling all those projects was a tragedy but the reality was that most of the projected stalin era surface fleet was a pipe dream. that said, the modern surface ships the soviet navy actually completed right after the war were all very solid designs that were more or less on par with their peers.
I'm missing something -- how is it short sighted? Aircraft carriers are great if you want to attack a limited opponent on the other side of the globe, but if you're not attacking (or if your opponent can reach your carriers with subs/nukes/missiles), what's the use?
Subs support your nuclear deterrent and let you attack shipping, which seems like plenty for national defense.