North Korea isn’t the only Russian ally providing troops for Putin’s war against Ukraine. Cuba is also sending soldiers in an apparent exchange for desperately needed oil to mitigate alarming shortages caused by diminishing supplies from Venezuela.
Russian tankers have unloaded about 3M barrels of oil in Cuba since late last year, according to the shipping tracking service MaritimeTraffic. While nowhere close to the volumes of Russian deliveries at the height of the Cold War, when Moscow covered 90 percent of Cuba’s energy needs and Fidel Castro sent troops to fight the Kremlin’s wars in Africa, the latest deliveries are the largest since Russia resumed oil shipments to Cuba in 2022, some months after invading Ukraine.
While Cuba’s special services have acted extensively in Latin America and Africa, their covert presence in Europe is less known.
During the interim in which Russia stopped sending subsidized oil to Cuba, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist regime relied on fuel subsidies from Venezuela, secured through intelligence, paramilitary, and political assistance to its leftist government. But a 75 percent decline in Venezuelan deliveries over recent years due to diminished productivity has thrown Cuba back into energy paralysis, sparking social unrest.
Russia has come to the rescue at a price. As oil deliveries to Cuba rise, so do the number of Cubans serving in the Russian army. While Ukraine’s intelligence service SBU estimated their presence at about 1,000 in 2023, when the first Cuban died fighting in Ukraine during the fierce battle of Bakhmut, the number is now estimated at 5,000, approaching half that of the North Koreans sent by Kim Jung Un to Putin’s meat grinder.
Cuba is operating more covertly than North Korea, whose large troop contingents sent on transport ships are easily picked up by satellite. Cuban volunteers sign up individually through recruitment programs run by the Russian embassy in Havana and travel to Moscow on civilian charter flights that may move 200 at a time. While this could not possibly be arranged without the consent and active participation of the Cuban government, government authorities feign a neutral stance on the war, possibly for fear of jeopardizing the international aid Cuba gets from the EU.
Cuba’s UN delegation has abstained on votes condemning Russia’s invasion. Its state-controlled media recently went to elaborate lengths to cover up official involvement in Cuban mercenary recruitment after a youngster’s crying complaints from Ukraine about being dragged to the front, recorded in desperate phone calls with his exiled father, went viral on Miami’s social media.
Official claims of ignorance and of mounting an “investigation” into “illegal human trafficking to Russia” were revealed as a sham when Cuba’s ambassador in Moscow, Julio Antonio Garmendia Peña, told the press that his government had “nothing against Cubans signing a contract to participate legally with the Russian army in its operation.” The distressed whistleblower who said that he had been lured to Russia with promises of construction work, was thrown into a mental clinic in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
It’s possible that some Cuban officials may have gotten greedy in collecting lucrative commissions paid by Russia to fill recruitment quotas, preying on youngsters with no military vocation who might only be looking for a job or a passport to get out of Cuba. Cuban authorities claim to have arrested 17 people.
Cuba’s military involvement with Russia in Ukraine operates at several levels. Cubans found on a windswept Russian army shooting range seem highly motivated fighting men. The Patrick Lancaster military podcast recently came across a group of well-indoctrinated Cuban soldiers in full combat camouflage, training with Dragunov 7.62 sniper rifles.
“We are working with the Russian army. Russia and Cuba are brothers,” said one of them. “We are fighting for Russia’s freedom … against fascism,” exclaimed another.
According to the interview, they had spent two months on the front lines with the Hispaniola Brigade, a unit supposedly composed of “football hooligans” but filled with Cubans and being turned into a PMC (paramilitary company), like the notorious Wagner Group to which the Cuban killed in Bakhmut belonged.
A recent investigation by the Schemes research institute released on Radio Free Europe says that a large Cuban contingent has also been incorporated into the elite 106th Guards Air Assault Division based in Tula outside Moscow, which operates as a “strategic reserve” for rapid deployment to critical areas of the front. Elements of the 106th are currently fighting alongside North Korean special forces in Kursk.
There have been a series of high-level exchanges between Russian and Cuban military officials over the past couple of years. Putin’s Director of the State Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, met the life-long chief of Cuba’s armed forces, Raul Castro, in Havana in 2023, when they signed an MOU on “military cooperation at international and regional levels.” A year later a Russian nuclear submarine, missile frigate, and fleet tanker turned up at the port of Havana in the biggest display of Russian military presence in the Caribbean since the 1960s.
A Cuban military delegation headed by defense minister Alvaro López Miera, including top officials of the G-2 military intelligence department, traveled to Moscow in June 2023 for a series of exchanges with Russian counterparts. They proceeded to Belarus, which served as springboard for Russia’s failed attempt to take Kiev in 2022, and signed further agreements with Belarusian defense officials for training Cuban troops and the “development of joint military projects in a planned form.”
According to SBU sources, about a hundred members of Cuba’s special forces called Avispas Negras, trained for undercover missions of infiltration, intelligence, terrorism, and asymmetric warfare subsequently arrived for linguistic instruction in Ukrainian and other east European languages at the Lojeu State Pedagogical University outside Minsk.
While Cuba’s special services have acted extensively in Latin America and Africa, their covert presence in Europe is less known. During the Balkans conflict of the 1990s, a Cuban undercover team was detected spying on the U.S. air base in Aviano, Italy, from where NATO flew missions over Serbia, according to a U.S. Senate investigation.
Some analysts speculate that Russia may be seeking to also use Cuba as a transfer point for its heavily sanctioned shadow fleet of tankers to unload oil for shipment to third countries. There are reports of current talks between Havana and Moscow about building a new oil refinery in Cuba.
President Trump may want to bring up the matter of Cuba in talks with Putin. If the Russians are serious about ending the war in Ukraine, they should no longer need the Cubans and could be asked to reciprocate for any concessions the U.S. struggles to get out of Zelensky by pulling the plug on Cuba to test Russia’s sincerity.
Russia can do the same with Nicolás Maduro’s drug trafficking dictatorship in Venezuela, whose longtime defense minister. Vladimir Padrino López, is a “Russian asset” who received major kickbacks from Russian arms deals, according to a former Venezuelan spy chief who says that the army head is the main impediment to a coup against Maduro.
If the U.S. is going to respect Russia’s near abroad then Russia should respect the principles enshrined in America’s Monroe Doctrine.
READ MORE from Martin Arostegui:
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Publish date : 2025-03-02 14:30:00
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