At a time of heightened tension in the Middle East, Cuba’s handpicked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, met with Iranian leaders in Tehran and signed half a dozen cooperation agreements in another signal that Havana is strengthening its alliance with anti-Western regimes.
Díaz-Canel traveled to Iran on Sunday and met with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the next day. At the meeting, Khamenei said the two countries should use their “capacities … to set up an alliance and a coalition among those countries that share the same position against the U.S. and Western bullying,” English-language Iranian television channel PressTV reported.
The two countries are under U.S. sanctions and are included in a U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism.
Cuban and Iranian officials signed seven cooperation memorandums in mining, energy, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and agriculture. They also signed an “action plan” for cooperating in telecommunications and information technologies.
In a press conference Monday, Iran’s president, Seyed Ebrahim Raisi, said Díaz-Canel’s visit marked a “historic turning point” in the relations between the two countries and that the two governments shared “a great congruence of views and a determination to enhance cooperation and coordination.”
Díaz-Canel also mentioned “innovation in trade between the two countries as one of the effective solutions” in moving away from the dollar, according to the official website of the presidency of Iran.
The Cuban leader said the two governments “expressed a shared commitment to make urgent efforts to push the international community toward condemning Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people … and demanding an immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.
High-level diplomatic contacts between the two countries significantly intensified this year as Cuba seeks a lifeline for the country’s troubled economy.
This is the first time in 22 years that a Cuban leader has visited Iran since Fidel Castro went to Tehran in 2001. Díaz-Canel’s visit follows a trip by Iran’s president to the island in June and a previous meeting in Havana with the Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in February. The two leaders also met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September.
Since the Cuban government authorized Cubans to own small and medium private businesses in 2021 amid an accelerated economic downfall, it has also been courting its traditional political allies to seek investment and financing to come out of the crisis without embarking on broader market reforms. But so far, Cuba’s version of shuttle diplomacy — including tours by Díaz-Canel, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero and other senior officials to Russia, China, Belarus and other countries in Asia and Africa — has not provided substantial aid or financial commitments that could allow the island’s communist leaders to continue ruling the country without further economic changes. The governments of Russia, China and Belarus have also encouraged Cuba to speed up economic reforms.
Mirroring offers made to Russia, Díaz-Canel told a group of 200 Iranian entrepreneurs and officials that “Cuba is open to any type of business model, in terms of cooperation and investment, that Iranian businessmen propose.”
“We aspire for Iran to become an important economic actor in Cuba’s development model,” he said, encouraging the entrepreneurs to invest in the island so the two countries could be more successful in responding to “the pressure, the sanctions and the blockade imposed by the empire” — Cuba’s preferred terminology for the United States — Cuban state media reported.
Before traveling to Tehran, Díaz-Canel also visited Qatar after participating in the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai. In Qatar, where Cuba runs a hospital, Díaz-Canel also pitched investment opportunities on the island.
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