HAVANA — Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov condemned U.S. sanctions on Cuba on Thursday as he visited the island and met with high leaders, together with newly re-elected President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

Lavrov was on the final leg of a Latin American tour that has taken him to Brazil, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The Russian overseas minister met with Díaz-Canel and semi-retired however nonetheless influential chief Raul Castro, in keeping with images revealed by the Communist Party newspaper Granma, though no additional particulars had been supplied on the content material of the conferences.

During his go to to the island nation, which for many years was a staunch Moscow ally, Lavrov condemned the American financial sanctions on Cuba, and blasted the U.S. for in search of to impose “its will on the world,” in keeping with a dispatch on the state media outlet Cubadebate.

Earlier within the day, Lavrov met together with his Cuban counterpart Bruno Rodríguez and took half in a wreath-laying ceremony at a memorial in Havana for Cuban independence hero José Martí.

Rodríguez, for his half, rejected what he referred to as the “expansionist aspirations” of NATO and the sanctions imposed on Russia.

Cuba has had an intensive relationship with Moscow because the Nineteen Sixties, when it joined the bloc of socialist international locations led by the then Soviet Union, receiving many important imports - fertilizers, industrial gear, spare components and, above all, oil - in change for sugar.

Russia, together with Venezuela, is considered one of Cuba’s few suppliers of oil, sending an undetermined quantity to the island, which is present process a extreme power disaster.

Also, two weeks in the past, Cuban banks began to just accept funds with MIR playing cards, a fee system in Russia that enables Russian vacationers to make money withdrawals and convert rubles to Cuban pesos.

MIR playing cards are accepted in different companion international locations of Russia, together with Turkey and Vietnam, and are operated by the state-owned Russian National Card Payment System.

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