Russian tourists in San Francisco de Asis square in Havana, February 28, 2022. Cuba will soon have a hotel exclusively for this clientele, the Kremlin announced last month. ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP
NARRATIVE – The Kremlin is conducting a diplomatic and economic offensive against the Cuban authorities. With, at the end of the day, less than 160 km from the United States, military, technical and tourism cooperation.
A tall black man with blond hair like wheat and a waiter by trade greets a family of three tourists. “Oh, those Russians! They don’t answer us, they don’t even look at us,” the boy complains. Maybe because Russians only have a crush on a tavern in the heart of Old Havana, on O’Reilly Street. A few blocks from Bistrot de Paris, or Sloppy Joe, the destination of Americans vacationing in Cuba in the 1950s, a fresh Cuban-Russian bar, Tabarish, welcomes Moscow tourists. On Crocodile Island, the latter have their habits, their place, even if the Moscow restaurant is now a ruin and the Nazdarovie, a bourgeois copy of a Soviet restaurant founded around the 2010s, has closed its doors swept away by the pandemic.
The Kremlin announced at the end of March that Cuba would soon have a hotel reserved exclusively for Russian customers. Moscow and Havana are developing a tourism strategy entirely dedicated to the residents of the Federation…
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