Maravi

Medvedev to visit Cuba

Medvedev to visit Cuba
Written by Larry Moonze in Havana, Cuba
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 10:51:13

RUSSIAN President Dmitry Medvedev is scheduled to visit Cuba next week on Thursday.
President Medvedev would make a stopover in Havana after visiting Peru, Brazil and Venezuela. This is according to a programme released by the Kremlin Press Service.

Only last week when Cuban foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque met with President Medvedev at the Kremlin in Moscow, the Russian leader said Cuba had been and remained Russia's key partner in Latin America.

"Your visit constitutes yet more proof that relations between Russia and Cuba are developing very dynamically," President Medvedev told Perez Roque.

"We have overcome the hiatus of the past decade. Our contacts are very rich and our relations are very friendly. Next year we are expecting chairman of the State Council and Council of Ministers of Cuba Raul Castro in Russia and hope that his visit will make yet another contribution to the development of our relations...In the near future other contacts will also take place. Of course we need to pay attention to the development of our trade and economic ties because this element of our relations is still not as developed as we would like."

This year alone Russian deputy premier Igor Sechin visited the Cuba thrice in just four months. Russia sent three planeloads of hurricane relief to Havana apart from a US $335 million credit line to buy Russian goods and services.

Russia has also invited Cuba to join its yet-to-be operational Global Navigation Satellite System (Glonass) which is equivalent to the US Global Positioning System (GPS).

President Medvedev's visit to Cuba comes barely a week after his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao held similar exchanges with Havana.

At the time Russia is trying to reassert its presence in the Cuban economy and Latin America in general, China as of 2007 was the second economic partner to Cuba after Venezuela.

To some Russia and Cuba relations are best remembered for the October Missile Crisis, in 1962, at the height of the Cold War.

Russia had placed intermediate-range missiles in Cuba which could double the Soviet strategic arsenal and provide a real deterrent to a potential US attack against the Soviet Union. This ended up to be the closest the world ever came to nuclear war until then US president John F. Kennedy and USSR premier Nikita Khrushchev struck a deal to dismantle the missiles. The US on the other hand had to promise not to attack Cuba. Earlier in 1961, president Kennedy's administration had sponsored the failed Bay of Pigs invasion aimed at deposing the Fidel Castro revolutionary regime.

However, Russia under the then USSR was the main backbone of the Cuban economy as it imported a bulky of Cuban sugar after the USA's embargo against the island revoked the quota to America.

That trade evaporated soon after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s leading to Cuba entering a Special Period, an economic crisis.

Following the demise of the Soviet Union, the US tightened its sanctions against Cuba in a bid to make the island's economy scream. At that point Cuba turned to China among other measures to save the economy from falling on its knees.
Elsewhere, President Medvedev and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez are likely to preside over joint naval war games in the Caribbean Sea.

President Chavez, with a cold relationship with the US President George W Bush's administration, has moved to procure Russian arms. He has also wooed Russian energy giant Gazprom to Venezuela to invest in explorations, exploitation, processing, commercialization of power, oil and gas together with Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).
President Medvedev would also attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in

Labels: COMMUNISM, CUBA, DMITRY MEDVEDEV, RUSSIA

posted by MrK @ 10:53 PM