Russia-Cuba: Cooperation and friendship over time
The Russia-Cuba Friendship Society is celebrating today the 60th anniversary of the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the 75th of the victory over German fascism.
The president of the Society, Alexei Lavrov, recalls that the organization was created in 1964. He was elected in 2013 as vice president and in 2018 he became the top leader of that entity that concentrates loads of common history.
Fidel Castro’s personality has always been, is and will be a source of inspiration for the aforementioned Friendship Society and for all of us, he commented in a talk at the headquarters of the Cuban embassy in this nation.
Russia will host the regional meeting of European friendship societies with Cuba in October, said the also deputy finance minister.
The future of the society is promising. I hope that we will be able to fulfill the task of making it represented throughout the country and recover the status that existed in the Soviet era to stop being only interregional, Lavrov emphasized.
For this year, the creation of a digital platform for the activities of the friendship society is expected, he said.
On his side, the honorary president of the aforementioned Friendship Society, Vadim Saushev, narrated how in the early 1960s he traveled to Cuba and participated in the first tasks of Komsommol, where he was listed as second secretary of that organization.
In 1962, according to Saushev, Fidel Castro met with Soviet youths at the Habana Libre hotel and there, amid anecdotes told at dawn by the Commander, as he is known here, the promise was made to create a friendship organization between young people from both countries, he narrated.
The meeting was on the 14th floor of the aforementioned hotel with a group of bearded men, with Fidel in front and whom we overwhelmed with our insistent questions, commented the honorary president, in whose eyes the youthful flash of almost 60 years ago seemed to appear.
Saushev was the first vice president of the Friendship Society, after the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union guided the first cosmonaut on Earth, Yuri Gagarin, to lead the society on the Soviet side. Ernesto Che Guevara did it for the Cuban.
It became a tradition to place a cosmonaut at the head of the Friendship Society, on the Soviet side and then the Russian. The last of them to occupy that position was Yuri Romanenko, while on the Cuban side it is now headed by cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez.
He recalled that the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Victory over fascism is the result of a sacred contest, the Great Patriotic War, which left 27 million dead, although if the wounded or disabled are taken into account, the number rises to about 100 million, he clarified.
Therefore, each family in this nation has a father, brother, grandfather, mother or close relative included in the aforementioned figure, said Saushev, whose biography was always linked to the island, an example of the never interrupted friendship between the peoples of both states.
Lab/ Taked from Prensa Latina
Impactos: 3