HAVANA — Russia’s president met with ailing revolutionary icon Fidel Castro on Friday, winding up a visit aimed at freshening relations with his country’s old Cold War ally and raising Moscow’s profile across Latin America.
Dmitry Medvedev spent hours talking and sightseeing with President Raul Castro before meeting privately with his 82-year-old older brother.
Medvedev and Raul Castro laid a wreath at a monument to Soviet soldiers who died while serving in Cuba in the early 1960s, a symbol of Cuba’s once-prominent part in the communist bloc and the history of its ties to Russia.
Wearing a gray suit instead of his traditional olive-green army uniform and clutching Med- vedev’s arm, Raul Castro shouted to television cameras, “It has been a magnificent visit, and now he will see Fidel.”
Russian officials deny that Medvedev’s four-nation trip is meant to provoke the United States, but the chat with Fidel Castro capped meetings with Washington’s staunchest opponents in the region. Details about the meeting with the older Castro were not immediately available.
Medvedev toured a visiting Russian warship on Thursday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and earlier met with Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, saying Russia might participate in a socialist trade bloc founded by Chavez and Cuba.
Medvedev also signed deals with Brazil and Peru, part of an effort to strengthen Russia’s political, economic and military connections across a region long dominated by U.S. influence.
“One must admit, to put it simply, we have never had a serious presence here,” Medvedev told reporters.
“We visited states that no Russian leader, and no Soviet leader, ever visited. This means one thing: that attention simply was not paid to these countries,” he said. “And in some ways we are only now beginning full-fledged, full-format and, I hope, mutually beneficial contacts with the leaders of these states.”
Medvedev’s Latin America tour is in some ways a response to U.S. moves in Eastern Europe, where Russia sees its own security threatened by U.S. plans to build a missile-defense system in former Soviet satellite states.
Medvedev said he and Raul Castro had discussed economic and “military-technical cooperation” — apparently arms sales — “as well as security and regional cooperation.”
Raul Castro, 77, served as Cuba’s defense minister for nearly five decades, working alongside Soviet military officials. A steadfast communist, he often visited the Soviet Union.
