Press release on Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s upcoming visit to the Republic of Cuba

On February 19, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit the Republic of Cuba.

Sergey Lavrov is scheduled to meet with the President of the Republic of Cuba Miguel Díaz-Canel y Bermudez and hold talks with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba Bruno Rodríguez. The parties are expected to discuss a wide range of topical issues on the global and regional agenda, as well as various aspects of bilateral cooperation, including trade, economic, cultural, and humanitarian matters.

Cooperation with Cuba – Russia’s key partner in Latin America and the Caribbean, to which our country is bound by strong relations of friendship, solidarity, and mutual respect, which are not subject to external factors – is based on the Declaration on the Principles of Relations between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Cuba (1996), the Memorandum on the Principles of Strategic Cooperation (2009), as well as the Joint Statement of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin and Chairman of the State Council and Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cuba Miguel Diaz-Canel y Bermudez on Common Approaches in International Affairs (2018) .

Bilateral political contacts are highly dynamic. In 2023, Prime Minister of Cuba Manuel Marrero Cruz paid an official visit to our country (June 6-17). President of the National Assembly of People’s Power of the Republic of Cuba Esteban Lazo took part in the Russia - Latin America International Parliamentary Conference held in Moscow (November 29 - December 2). On October 7, 2023, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the Republic of Cuba Miguel Díaz-Canel y Bermudez.

Meetings of foreign ministers are held on a regular basis. Russia-Cuba political consultations on international, regional, and bilateral issues are conducted on a regular basis. An inter-ministerial Plan of Political Consultations is also in place (the next one is for the period from 2023 to 2027, signed following the meeting between Sergey Lavrov and Bruno Rodríguez in New York in September 2022).

Along with the key aspects of political interaction, priority attention during the forthcoming meetings will be given to building up trade, economic and investment ties, including taking into account the full-fledged bilateral legal framework that has been developed over the past period to address this issue. The existing Intergovernmental Russian-Cuban Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, and Technical Cooperation plays a crucial role in this work.

A solid basis for deepening Russia-Cuba cooperation in the global arena is the closeness or coincidence of our positions on the main problems of the regional and global agenda, our commitment to strict compliance with the standards and principles of international law, first and foremost the UN Charter, and strengthening of the central role of the United Nations.

Cuba has traditionally supported Russia’s priorities at the UN General Assembly, in particular on countering the glorification of Nazism, confidence-building measures in outer space, particularly not being the first to deploy weapons in space, and international information security.

Moscow and Havana are in solidarity on the unacceptability of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, the categorical inadmissibility of the use of unilateral sanctions in violation of the UN Charter, and endeavour to work together to build a just multipolar world order based on genuine equality of states.

The Cuban leadership, despite the enormous pressure exerted on it by the “collective West”, openly declares that it was the United States that provoked the current Ukrainian crisis because of NATO’s expansion to our country’s borders and its irresponsible disregard of Russia’s decades-long justified demands for security guarantees. Cuba votes against major anti-Russian initiatives on international platforms.

Russia strongly supports the demands for an immediate end to Washington’s illegal trade, economic, and financial blockade of Cuba, and the removal of the country from the US State Department’s unilateral list of state sponsors of terrorism. We believe that the application of illegal sanctions against Havana, which is causing enormous damage to the island’s economy and restricts the natural rights of Cuban citizens to live in dignity and choose their own path of development, is contrary to the UN Charter fundamental principles and rules.