Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Cuban counterpart Miguel Diaz-Canel on Tuesday presented a united front against the United States, their common “enemy,” and lashed out at Western sanctions.
Both leaders inaugurated a bronze monument to Fidel Castro in the Russian capital, Moscow, and Putin praised the Cuban revolutionary as a “brilliant” man.
decades friendship
The Kremlin chief, who sent troops to Ukraine in February, praised Moscow’s decades-long friendship with Cuba and said the two countries should intensify their cooperation.
“We have always opposed various types of restrictions, embargoes, blockades,” Putin told the Cuban leader in the Kremlin, celebrating Havana’s backing of Moscow in the international arena.
Díaz-Canel, for his part, said that his visit to Moscow had a “deep” meaning.
“In the first place, it occurs because both countries – Russia and Cuba – are subjected to unjust and arbitrary sanctions that continue, and they have a common enemy, the Yankee empire that manipulates a large part of the world,” he said in the Kremlin.
Díaz-Canel backed Russia in its confrontation with the West, saying Moscow must stand its ground.
Cuba has been under US sanctions for more than six decades, while Russia is under an unprecedented wave of Western sanctions after Putin launched an offensive in Ukraine on February 24.
Díaz-Canel hopes the visit to Russia will help boost his country’s struggling energy sector amid prolonged blackouts and fuel shortages.
