The Cuban leader visits Moscow to inaugurate a statue of Fidel Castro
In the midst of severe international isolation due to his devastating offensive in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, according to some sources, is even having trouble getting his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to pick up the phone, welcomes the visit to Moscow of an ally to be able to show the public that they are not entirely alone. And who better to help in this task than the top Cuban leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has been in the capital since Saturday waiting to be received in the Kremlin.
Finally this Tuesday Putin met with him to talk about “strategic cooperation” and they later went together to inaugurate a statue of the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, in a square in the Moscow neighborhood of Sókol, on Novopeschánaya street. , an area of Moscow that, according to its neighbors, has little to do with Castro and Cuba, although a section of the street has been named after him for five years.
Perhaps that is why last winter it was decided to erect the monument, made by the Russian sculptor Alexei Chabanenko. It depicts Fidel in military uniform with his traditional beret, standing on a block of stone with the inscription ‘Cuba’.
Fidel Castro’s friendship with Moscow begins not immediately after the 1959 Cuban revolution, but after the failed attempt by the CIA and US-based exiles from the island to overthrow the regime by force in April 1961. Castro won at the Bay of Pigs, but understood that such attempts could be repeated and decided to throw himself into the arms of the Soviet Union. It was then that the Castro regime proclaimed itself Marxist-Leninist.
The USSR’s military and economic aid to the island intensified, which was decisive in being able to withstand the American embargo decreed from then on. But the Kremlin’s support was not disinterested, since, in its struggle with the United States during the ‘cold war’ for world dominance, it was an enormous achievement to have an ally, a spearhead, just ninety miles from the Key West coast (Florida).
This alliance was about to provoke a nuclear war in 1962, during the so-called missile crisis. To the deployment of American ballistic rockets in Turkey, the USSR responded by installing the same weapons in Cuba. The blood did not reach the river because Moscow and Washington ended up agreeing to withdraw their rockets respectively. The Americans also promised not to invade the island.
military advisers
That, however, did not please Fidel, since the decision was made behind his back. Despite this, the leader of the Cuban revolution made his first trip to the Soviet Union in May 1963. From that moment on, the island, which was already full of Russian military advisers, also brought together many engineers, economists and specialists. Soviets in almost all productive areas. The USSR also began to receive Cuban students to train in its educational centers.
Fidel would travel to the USSR three more times, the last time in 1987, with Mikhail Gorbachev already in power, the last Soviet leader. Between them they did not make very good friends. The reformism of ‘perestroika’ did not please the Cuban leaders.
Fidel’s relations with Moscow cooled down definitively after the disintegration of the USSR. During the 1990s, neither he traveled to Russia nor did the then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, travel to Cuba. Financial aid to the island ceased due to the difficulties of the Russian economy.
After this break, Putin visited the island in December 2000, shortly after arriving at the Kremlin. The attempt to revitalize relations failed after the Russian president decided in 2002 to close the former Soviet radar base in Lourdes, built in the vicinity of Havana to spy on the Americans.
But the tensions that arose between Russia and the West, first over Georgia and then over Ukraine, advised the head of the Kremlin to reassess relations with the Cuban regime.
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