The authorities of Belarus and Cuba announced that the Island’s military will receive training in the European nationthe ally most involved in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and with which Havana is strengthening political and economic ties.
According to the official Belta agency, last Thursday the head of the Department of International Military Cooperation and Deputy Defense Minister for International Military Cooperation, Valery Revenko, met with the military, naval and air attaché at the Cuban Embassy in Russia and Belarus, Colonel Mónica Milian Gómez.
According to that brief report, “it is reported that the meeting took place during the XI International Exhibition of Weapons and Military Equipment MILEX. The parties discussed the strengthening of mutually beneficial partnership relations between the Defense Ministries of Belarus and Cuba.”
It was Revenko who, after the fact and through his Twitter profile, indicated about the meeting: “The main attention was paid to the training of Cuban military personnel in the Republic of Belarus and to the development of military cooperation between the two countries in a planned manner”.
In addition, according to the photos shared by Revenko, the ambassador of Havana in Belarus, Santiago Pérez Benítez, was also at the meeting.
This is the first announcement of this type after last March the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, will visit Cuba and meet with the heads of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and the Ministry of the Interior (MININT), as well as with Miguel Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro.
In Pátrushev’s meeting with General Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas, head of the Cuban MININT, they spoke about “cooperation in the field of security and threats from the West” and about the joint efforts of both governments to counteract the so-called “color revolutions” and the “destructive activities” that, according to the representatives of the Russian and Cuban regimes, are carried out by non-governmental organizations.
This kind of meeting made it clear that the collaboration between Moscow and Havana, and now with Minsk, plus the one that has existed for a long time with China, is openly aimed at the repressive sphere.
Andrei Manoylo, founder and president of the Association of Information Operations Specialists, a former member of the scientific council of the Russian Security Council, chaired by Patrushev, stated shortly after that Moscow can help strengthen the position of its Cuban ally only if the Cuban leadership itself asks it to send its specialists to counter “color revolutions” and information operations and counter operations.
Dmitry Morozov, senior researcher at the Institute of Latin America of the Russian Academy of Sciences, added that Moscow can provide some assistance to Havana not only in the field of information warfare, but also in the sphere of power.
“Russia can provide some kind of military support or provide political and diplomatic support at the international level (…) Russia can send some special units, provide support through special services that specialize in suppressing the opposition.”He suggested.
Morozov confirmed that the regime of Daniel Ortega is already using “adequate assistance” from Russia.
“Our advisers are there, there is a center for the training of anti-drug units, but how much it deals only with this is a good question,” he said.
In the case of Belarus, the trips of high-level Cuban officials to that country are becoming more frequent. Colonel Mónica Milian Gómez, in charge of sealing the military training agreement with Minsk, was accredited in August 2022 as military, naval and air attaché of the Cuban Embassy in Belarus, after years of holding that position in the diplomatic representation of Havana in Moscow.
In mid 2021, Milian Gómez attended the Army 2021 arms fair, in the outskirts of Moscow, at the head of a Cuban military delegation. The Russian press then identified her as the director of the Grito de Baire Research, Development and Production Center, belonging to the Military Industry Union (UIM) of the FAR Ministry (MINFAR).
These same reports ensured that at the fair the island’s military was interested in acquiring a Russian communications technology that cannot be blockedthe Azart system, manufactured by the company NPO Angstrem.
According to Rossiyskaya GazetaMilián Gómez “has experience in modernizing and organizing communications systems.”
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