Russia hosts Cuban foreign minister and urges US not to blockade Cuba

The Cuban for­eign min­is­ter vis­it­ed Moscow on Wednes­day as the is­land faces black­outs and se­vere fu­el short­ages wors­ened by a U.S oil em­bar­go.

Cuban For­eign Min­is­ter Bruno Ro­driguez held talks with his Russ­ian coun­ter­part Sergey Lavrov and was set to meet lat­er in the day with Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin.

Lavrov urged the U.S. to re­frain from blockad­ing Cu­ba, which has strug­gled to im­port oil for its pow­er plants and re­finer­ies af­ter U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump threat­ened any na­tion that sold oil to Cu­ba with tar­iffs.

“To­geth­er with most mem­bers of the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty, we are call­ing on the U.S. to show com­mon sense, take a re­spon­si­ble ap­proach and re­frain from its plans of sea block­ade,” Lavrov said dur­ing the talks with Ro­driguez.

He promised that Moscow will “con­tin­ue sup­port­ing Cu­ba and its peo­ple in pro­tect­ing the coun­try’s sov­er­eign­ty and se­cu­ri­ty.”

Krem­lin spokesman Dmit­ry Peskov al­so not­ed that “Rus­sia, like many oth­er coun­tries, has con­sis­tent­ly spo­ken against the block­ade of the is­land.”

“We have our re­la­tions with Cu­ba, and we val­ue these re­la­tions very much,” Peskov told re­porters. “And we in­tend to fur­ther de­vel­op them — of course, dur­ing dif­fi­cult times, by pro­vid­ing ap­pro­pri­ate as­sis­tance to our friends.”

Asked whether send­ing fu­el to Cu­ba could de­rail a re­cent warm­ing of ties with Wash­ing­ton, Peskov re­spond­ed that “we don’t think these is­sues are linked.”

Putin has praised Trump’s ef­forts to me­di­ate an end to the con­flict in Ukraine, and Moscow and Wash­ing­ton have dis­cussed ways to re­vive their eco­nom­ic ties.

Venezuela, one of Cu­ba’s main oil sup­pli­ers, stopped sell­ing crude to the is­land in Jan­u­ary af­ter the U.S. cap­tured then-Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro in a pre-dawn raid and flew him to New York to face drug traf­fick­ing charges.

Mex­i­co al­so cut off oil ship­ments to Cu­ba in Jan­u­ary, af­ter Trump is­sued the tar­iff threat.

Rus­sia’s Izves­tia news out­let last week cit­ed the Russ­ian em­bassy in Ha­vana as say­ing that Moscow was prepar­ing to send hu­man­i­tar­i­an fu­el ship­ment to Ha­vana in the near fu­ture. On Mon­day, Russ­ian am­bas­sador to Cu­ba, Vik­tor Ko­ronel­li, said that Moscow was look­ing in­to de­tails of or­ga­niz­ing as­sis­tance to Cu­ba but of­fered no specifics.

Cu­ba’s fu­el short­ages al­ready have forced Russ­ian tourist com­pa­nies to halt the sales of pack­age tours to the is­land af­ter the Cuban gov­ern­ment said that it will not pro­vide fu­el to planes that land on the is­land.