The Royal Canadian Navy now finds itself in the unusual position of both shadowing Russian warships as a threat in the Caribbean and sharing an anchorage with them as a guest in the port of Havana — because Canada accepted an invitation to send a patrol ship to Cuba while the Russian navy is in town.
And it’s not clear just who in government or the military knew about the invitation from Cuba. The Caribbean nation has been a full-throated supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and Cubans have been fighting alongside Russian soldiers in that country.
A spokesperson for the Department of National Defence (DND) told CBC News on Friday that the department was aware the Russians would be in Havana port on the same days as the Canadians.
But when asked about the visit on CBC’s Power and Politics on Thursday evening, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told host David Cochrane she knew nothing about it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And yet, on Friday Canada’s Harry DeWolf-class offshore patrol vessel HMCS Margaret Brooke sailed into Havana as a guest of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, just hours after the Russian flotilla docked in the same harbour.
Three days later, the frigate HMCS Fredericton set sail for Havana for a visit then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan said would celebrate the “strong, positive and productive relationship” between Cuba and Canada.
“Amidst global insecurity, Canada believes in pragmatic diplomacy to engage countries of different perspectives while we continue to uphold our values and interests and defend the international rules-based order,” he told CBC News.
The friendly visit sends a confusing message about Canada’s allegiances, said Russian political scientist Vladimir Rouvinski, director of the CIES Research Center at Icesi University, Colombia and an expert on Russia’s presence in the Western hemisphere.
“The Canadian Armed Forces will continue to track the movements and activities of the Russian naval flotilla” after it departs Havana, Kened Sadiku of DND told CBC News.
“In the minds of the Cuban elite, Canada is not a friend, it’s a country that they can — I don’t want to use the word manipulate, but they can kind of dance around and make them act in ways that would not align totally with the main enemy, which obviously is the United States,” he said.
The original article contains 1,882 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I didn’t know Cuba was actively supporting Russia. I just changed my position from “end the US embargo” to “everyone else should join the embargo”. Supporting Russia is supporting genocide.
The embargo is the reason they’re still so friendly with Russia. Ending the embargo would be a massive step towards friendly relations with the US and less with Russia.
If we could end the embargo in exchange to them telling Putin to get fucked, I’d be all for it, but I don’t think there’s enough trust on either side for that to work right now.
Ok? Tell the Cubans in Florida that.
The funniest part is Cubans have better medical care than the American working class, including completely novel vaccines that have existed for decades that America doesn’t let its citizens have lmao
I didn’t know Cuba was actively supporting Russia.
Cuba has been staunchly aligned with Russia for like 70 years. That was the major reason for the US embargo in the first place.
Yeah, but before 2014 that wasn’t a good reason to embargo them.
Really?
Cuba has long had good relations with Russia. It was a key ally to the former Soviet Union during the Cold War that briefly hosted nuclear missiles at Moscow’s behest during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/12/americas/russian-navy-cuba-intl/index.html
Also…
Again on October 19, 1960, almost two years after the Cuban Revolution had led to the deposition of the Batista regime, the U.S. placed an embargo on exports to Cuba except for food and medicine after Cuba nationalized the US-owned Cuban oil refineries without compensation. On February 7, 1962, the embargo was extended to include almost all exports.
I would argue the original reasoning was very valid. Helps to know the history though, I guess.
Embargoing countries because they’re aggressors in war of territorial expansion is valid.
Embargoing countries just because they’re communist is not valid.
Let me know if there’s something you still fail to understand about it.
I already provided the reasoning. Where does it say, “because they’re communist”?
(Let me know if you have a processing deficiency)
I mean doesn’t help when everyone else is embargoing them.
Hardly everyone. In fact, as far as I know, just the U.S.
I have British and Canadian relatives that have been to Cuban resorts.
Oh I mixed Cuba up with another country nevermind.
Yeah, I had a much more positive view of Cuba before reading that.
There are times when it’s downright embarrassing to be a Canadian, especially when the entrenched info silos of our gov’t and military lead to incidents like this.
We’re gonna have egg on our faces for a while because of this clusterpuck.
Eh. Russia is sabre rattling while protecting some of its fleet from Ukrainian attacks. A Canadian warship just sitting idly next to them in the same port is not exactly a good display of Russian strength.
One also notes that the Canadian warship (the HMCS Margaret Brooke, apparently) is not traveling in the company of an ocean-going tug to address the possibility that it breaks down and has to be towed back.
On top of that, Canada is not exactly the naval power of the U.S. or Britain or France or even Australia, but they’re still clearly not especially intimidated by the so-called powerful Russian navy.
Yeah. Not embarrassed about this at all. And a narrative that I should be is bizzare to me.
Cuba might get the short end of this one. If it becomes too embarrassing for our military/government they might cut off relations. And Canadian tourism is a big sustainer of Cuban coffers. Canada could cut off that income by blocking travel there, or even just declaring it as an “avoid all travel” zone, effectively cutting off tourism.
The truth is, we don’t know what’s going on. Maybe this was a deliberate decision to get closer to the Russians without triggering an incident. Maybe the US knew about this and approved it. Maybe it was a blunder, but we can’t just assume it was.
