In Russia, renewed talk about a reactivated Lourdes base

The Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, does not rule out that Russia will reactivate an electronic listening post in Havana province in response to the United States’ “aggressive foreign policy” toward Russia, said the deputy chairman of the Russian Duma’s Committee on Security, Dmitri Yevgenyevich Gorovstov.

Gorovstov did not tell Izvestia if he had made a sounding of Duma deputies or how he had come to that conclusion.

The lawmaker’s statement, published by the daily Izvestia, was widely reproduced in the Russian media, which this week reported on Cuban President Raúl Castro’s visit to Moscow for the Victory Day celebrations.

According to Izvestia, Russian “military experts assessed that information positively, calling Cuba a strategically important region.”

“In the conditions prevailing today in the geopolitical arena as a result of U.S. pressure and sanctions against Russia, cooperation with Cuba will develop toward the restoration of the relations that existed until the mid-1980s, before [Mikhail] Gorbachev came to power and that cooperation began to crumble,” Gorovstov was quoted by Izvestia as saying.

Military-technical cooperation between Russia and Cuba will be increased, he added. Indeed, present at the meeting Thursday (May 7) in Moscow between presidents Vladimir Putin and Raúl Castro were Gen. Leopoldo Cintra Frías, Cuba’s defense minister, and Col. Alejandro Castro Espín, an Interior Ministry specialist on national security affairs and President Castro’s son.

The visits to Cuba by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in February and Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin early this week were part of the shift in attitude, Gorovtsov said. Naryshkin reportedly met with Cuban Defense Ministry officials.

“I believe that soon we will be able to restore the monitoring station at Lourdes that was used by the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation,” Gorovtsov said.

Gorovtsov, 49, a member of the social-democratic Fair Russia Party, is also a member of the Duma’s committee on the budget for national defense, national security and law enforcement.

The Lourdes listening station near Havana was built in 1967 and shut down in 2002. It monitored military and other radio traffic emanating from the United States.

A report last July that the Lourdes base would be reactivated spread like wildfire in Moscow but was quashed by President Vladimir Putin within days of its publication.

“We are able to meet the challenges in the field of national defense without this component,” Putin told reporters then. “By agreement with our Cuban friends, we halted work in the center. We have no plans to resume that work.”

[For details in Progreso Weekly of that development, click here, here, and here.]

There was no immediate reaction from President Putin or Defense Minister Shoigu to Gorovtsov’s prediction.