A Russian navy ship arrived in Cuba on Saturday for a three-day stay, six weeks after Moscow sent a submarine and other naval vessels to visit the communist state off Florida’s coast.
The Smolny training ship was greeted with salvos from Cuban artillery before it anchored in Havana’s harbor, where residents and tourists gathered to take a look.
Russia’s embassy in Cuba said the ship, accompanied by two others, is “part of the Baltic Fleet group that is making a friendly visit to the Cuban capital.”
“One more example of the close relations between our people,” the embassy wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
In mid-June, the Russian nuclear-powered submarine Kazan — which Cuba said was not carrying nuclear weapons — docked in Havana for five days.
The unusual deployment so close to US territory came amid major tensions over the war in Ukraine, where the Western-backed government is fighting a Russian invasion.
The United States sent a fast-attack submarine to its Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba a day after the Russian submarine arrived.
During the Cold War, Cuba was an important client state for the Soviet Union. The deployment of Soviet nuclear missile sites on the island triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Washington and Moscow came close to war.
