Cuban Five, convicted of spying on exiles in Florida after 1959 uprising led by Fidel Castro, meet heads of Russian parliament and communist party

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Russia gave a red-carpet reception to five Cuban spies who served long prison terms in the United States, hailing them as heroes “of fortitude and resistance” and stressing its own role in securing their release.

The Cuban Five were convicted of spying on Cuban exiles in Florida at a time when anti-Castro groups were bombing Cuban hotels and staging acts of sabotage meant to destabilise the communist government.

The Cuban president, Raúl Castro, last year named the five spies Heroes of the Republic, the Cuban government’s highest honour, for infiltrating rightwing exile groups that plotted against Havana after a 1959 uprising led by his brother Fidel Castro ousted a pro-US dictator.

The Soviet Union was Cuba’s powerful international patron during the cold war when Havana nationalised US businesses and embraced socialist ideas. Moscow’s economic and military aid dried up after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

“We met earlier with some of your comrades, and I am very glad that now all of you are visiting Moscow,” the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said as he greeted the five in the foreign ministry’s Stalin-era building in central Moscow.

Spies, artificial insemination and the pope: how Cuba came in from the cold Read more

“We had been consistently pressing [for your release], including in our contacts with the Americans, and we are glad that in the long run our participation in your release turned out to be useful and yielded results,” Lavrov said. He called the five “a symbol of fortitude and resistance”.

On Monday, the group attended a military parade on Red Square to mark the 71st anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat by the Soviet Union and were to meet heads of Russia’s parliament and the communist party, Lavrov said.

Following the reversal of US policy towards Cuba under Barack Obama, who called for normalisation of ties, three of the five Cuban spies were freed on 17 December 2014 in an exchange for a Cuban man who had been jailed for nearly 20 years for spying on his own country for the Americans.

That same day Cuba released American aid worker Alan Gross in a humanitarian gesture after he had been held five years for bringing banned telecommunications equipment into Cuba.

The other two Cubans had been released earlier after serving their terms.