Putin, Cuban leader inaugurate Castro statue in Moscow, seek closer ties

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The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, received this Tuesday (22), in Moscow, the leader of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel. At the meeting, the two inaugurated a monument in a square in the Russian capital in honor of former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, in addition to promising to deepen ties between the two countries.

Interestingly, Castro doesn’t have any statues in Cuba. According to Raúl Castro, his brother and also the former dictator of the island, Fidel was against cultivating personalities – a common practice in other dictatorships.

Still, this Tuesday, Putin told Díaz-Canel that the two countries needed to relate on the “solid basis of friendship” established between Castro and the Soviet leaders. “It’s a real work of art – dynamic, moving and advancing. It creates the image of a fighter,” said the Russian president, referring to the statue.

The work depicts the Cuban revolutionary looking into the distance, hands on his hips. “I think it reflects Fidel’s personality in the struggle,” replied Cuba’s current leader.

Díaz-Canel had the main words at the meeting. Addressing the Russian Parliament, he showed his solidarity by directly endorsing Moscow’s stated pretext for sending its troops to Ukraine. “The reasons for the current conflict must be sought in the aggressive policy of the United States and the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders,” he said.

The Russian justification for the war, incidentally, recalls to some extent the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union, with the support of Fidel Castro, installed ballistic missiles on the island in the 1960s, threatening to fire them against the US. At the time, Washington also had such missiles in Turkey, close to Russia.

After American planes identified the installation of Soviet missiles, Washington and Moscow threatened each other and the stalemate – which lasted 14 days – left the world on the verge of nuclear war. The agreement for the withdrawal of missiles from Cuba was only reached when the US committed itself not to invade the island. Secretly, Washington also agreed to withdraw its missiles from Turkey.

The episode was recently quoted by the current American president, Joe Biden, as he spoke about the Ukraine War. “We haven’t faced a possible ‘Armageddon’ since [Jonh] Kennedy and the missile crisis”, said the democrat. In September, President Jair Bolsonaro also made this comparison.

On Tuesday, however, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said such crises were different, although he said the two conflicts were “a clash between the Russians and the US-led West”.

Cuba has been under the economic embargo of the United States since 1962, after the victory of the communists led by Castro. The Americans also implemented a series of sanctions against the Russians after their invasion of Ukraine. Díaz-Canel called the blockades unfair and arbitrary. “We have a common enemy: the Yankee empire that manipulates much of the world,” he declared to the Russians.

The Cuban leader’s trip to Moscow, however, is not based solely on the entry “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Díaz-Canel hopes the visit will help boost his country’s energy sector, amid a series of blackouts and fuel shortages on the island in recent months.

Putin, in turn, is trying to seek allies on the global stage and expand his gas and oil market – which has been undermined after the outbreak of war in Europe.

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