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Canal Habana and the television channel from Saint Petersburg signed a collaboration agreement that includes content exchange, joint film production, and strengthening cultural ties between both cities, reported the Cuban Television portal.
The agreement was signed by Erduy Valera Cruz, director of Canal Habana, and Ekaterina Fedorovna Khodarinova, director of the Russian television station, accompanied by other executives from the Havana channel.
According to Valera Cruz, "the document will be formalized at the beginning of May, when the first joint actions and possible meetings with official delegations will begin to be defined."
The planned programs will address topics of culture, heritage, and traditions, in addition to informative proposals that reflect the so-called "historical relationship" between Cuba and Russia. The agreement also includes technological development with an emphasis on multimedia environments to facilitate collaboration despite geographical distance.
The television agreement is not an isolated event: it is the most recent expression of a rapid "Russification" of Cuba that, with a striking Soviet nostalgia, is advancing on multiple fronts simultaneously.
In the educational sphere, in March 2026, Cuba announced that the language Russian will be introduced as the first foreign language in all primary and secondary schools starting from the 2026-2027 academic year, reviving practices from the 1970s and 1980s, including the "Russian on television" format that had already returned to Cuban screens in February 2025.
Currently, there are eight Russian language teaching centers on the island with over 1,300 graduates, and Russian teachers from the "Teachers of Russia Abroad" program are already teaching classes in schools in Havana, as if time had turned back fifty years.
In the media landscape, the Russian channel RT en Español has been since 2020 the only foreign medium with 24-hour broadcasting on Cuban television, following an agreement signed in 2018 between the Russian Deputy Minister of Telecommunications and the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television.
Economic cooperation is also advancing at a rapid pace: during the XXIII session of the Cuba-Russia Intergovernmental Commission, held from March 31 to April 1, agreements were reached on investments exceeding 1 billion dollars, the Russian management of Cuban industrial facilities in energy, transportation, and food, the resumption of GAZ vehicle assembly, and a fleet of fifty Moskvich taxis in Havana.
In addition, the Russian company Zarubezhneft and the Cuban CUPET are advancing in the Boca de Jaruco oil field with an investment of 100 million euros in thirty new wells, while in December 2025, Putin signed a decree to facilitate the relocation of Cuban talent —scientists and entrepreneurs— to Russian territory, a program that came into effect on April 15, 2026.
The picture is completed with a military cooperation agreement between Cuba and Russia signed in March 2025 and with the acceptance of Cuba as an associated member of the BRICS in October 2024 with direct support from Moscow. In February, Havana voted against a resolution demanding an immediate, complete, and unconditional ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, after four years of war, thus reaffirming its support for the invasion of Ukrainian territory led by Vladimir Putin.
The Cuban regime, immersed in the worst economic crisis in its history and without the support of Venezuela that it once had, seems to have found in Moscow the lifeline it lost with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, while the island's people suffer from blackouts, shortages, and repression that no television coproduction with St. Petersburg can remedy.
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