How has Russia’s relationship with Cuba changed since the Cold War?

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This is the script for my video posted on May 21, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

In June 2024, a Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine called the Kazan pulled into harbor at Havana, Cuba. It was joined by a guided missile frigate, a fuel tanker, and a rescue tug. US destroyers and unmanned surface vessels shadowed them the entire way in, and though the Pentagon publicly waved it off, that single port call was the loudest signal in a very quiet relationship between Russia and Cuba that has been rebuilding since the Cold War ended. We all know the stories about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet patronage, but how and why are the two countries collaborating today?

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba was abandoned almost overnight. Soviet subsidies, which had been around four billion dollars per year, simply stopped. The Cuban economy contracted by roughly a third in just three years, and the last former Soviet forces left the island in 1993. To put that in perspective, at the height of the Cold War the Soviets had thousands of troops stationed on Cuban soil, and Cuban divisions were deployed across Africa as Soviet proxies. By the mid-1990s, all of that was gone.

Russia and Cuba signed a very thin trade agreement in 1992, but the alliance was effectively dead. The only thing that kept Russia physically present was a giant signals intelligence, or SIGINT, facility called Lourdes, just south of Havana, which had been intercepting US communications since 1964. Russia paid a reported 200m dollars per year in rent to keep it running, but in October 2001, just one month after the 9/11 attacks, Vladimir Putin shut it down completely, saying the money could buy twenty satellites instead. This was the low point of the relationship.

In 2008, the Russian Navy made its first port call in Cuba since the Cold War ended, and the countries maintained casual relations. But in 2014 Cuba publicly recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and four months later Putin flew to Havana to announce that Russia was formally forgiving about 32b USD in Soviet-era debt that had been in accounting limbo. The remaining 3b dollars was structured into real, repayable debt, which is what made the deal work for Russia.

For the next eight years, the relationship grew quietly. Russian oil tankers started arriving in Cuban ports. Russian SIGINT collection ships made unannounced visits to Havana. And when Russia fully invaded Ukraine in 2022, the slow rebuild became a full realignment. Cuba was never neutral on the war in Ukraine. It abstained on the first UN resolution to condemn Russian aggression, then it voted against suspending Russia from the Human Rights Council. By February 2026, the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion, Cuba voted no on a Ukraine peace resolution, putting itself in the same voting bloc as North Korea and Iran.

But the most consequential development, the one that made this a transactional relationship instead of a purely symbolic one, was a recruitment scandal. Starting in 2022, Russian recruiters began running social media ads in Spanish offering Cuban men construction jobs in Russia for about 2000 USD per month. For context, the average state salary in Cuba is about 16 dollars per month at the informal exchange rate. The men who took the offer were flown to Russia, handed Russian-language contracts they could not read, given two weeks of training, and then sent to the frontlines in Ukraine.

Ukrainian military intelligence has confirmed by name over a thousand Cuban nationals fighting for Russia, with about 100 dead or missing as of late 2025. But they claim that up to 20000 Cubans have signed Russian military contracts since the war began. The US State Department puts the number of actually deployed troops somewhere between 1000 and 5000. In September 2023, the Cuban government arrested 17 recruiters and calls the practice human trafficking, but Ukrainian intelligence sources have indicated that Cuba is quietly tolerating it.

So what is Russia actually getting from Cuba apart from low-cost soldiers to throw at the frontlines? Well, it’s really just a thinner version of what the Soviet Union got during the Cold War: a friendly platform just 90 miles from the US and reliable backing at the UN. What Cuba gets in return is much thinner: sporadic shipments of Russian oil, an occasional debt write-off, and a great power patron during their worst economic crisis since the 1990s.

That thin return is exactly why this story has changed in the last few years. When the Wall Street Journal broke the story of foreign intelligence bases operating in Cuba in 2023, these bases were operated by China. Chinese trade with Cuba was around 915m USD in 2024, roughly 3-4x Russia’s peak. China is financing a massive solar build-out across the country, and when the current US administration began threatening Cuba in early 2026, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov publicly admitted that Russian oil aid to Cuba would probably last only a couple of months, and he declined to commit to defending the island militarily.

This is the real story. Russia may be back in Cuba, but not as the patron it once was. It came back for the symbolic value, for a vote at the UN, and for a pipeline of soldiers. The Cold War is over, and the new dynamic in Cuba tells us more about Russia’s limitations than its ambitions. The truth is, that Russian nuclear submarine that came into port in 2024, the Kazan, is the perfect example of this: it was a port call designed to be noticed and to signal capability and intent without actually committing to anything.

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