The renovation of the tracks would reduce the travel time from Havana to Santiago from 20 to 12 hours
14ymedio, Madrid, 3 September 2024 — The Russian Union of Railways (RZD) has dusted off its railway renovation agreement with Cuba, neither more nor less than seven years behind schedule. Serguei Pavlov, deputy director of RZD, said this Tuesday at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok that he plans to sign a contract this year for the modernization of the railway infrastructure in Cuba. The most obvious omission was, precisely, any news about what happened with the previous project.
The plan remains unchanged despite the technological advances that can be expected after all these years. Pavlov told the main Russian press agencies that the company began working on the project after the Russian Council of Ministers published in March a document on cooperation agreements with Cuba, which included the modernization of the railway.
It didn’t take much work for RZD to develop the proposal, since the highlights of the agreement are the remodeling and modernization of the central Havana-Santiago de Cuba line, whose extension is 835 kilometers; the south line 19 de Noviembre-Navajas station, including the Havana node and the Montalvo branch – 166 kilometers; and the Cienfuegos line – Santa Clara and Refinery branch – 77.4 kilometers. In total there are just over a thousand kilometers of infrastructure renovation, of the 12,000 that the Island has, which were already in the original plan.
Time does not seem to have passed for a plan that remains unchanged despite the technological advances that can be expected in all these years
Although the highlight, for novelty, seems to be the shortening of the travel time between Havana and Santiago de Cuba, which, if fulfilled, would go from 20 hours to 12, the truth is that the 2017 plan already contemplated it, since the peak speed of 120 kilometers per hour (km/h.) was planned.
Those 12 hours that, in the best case scenario, would separate the primary two cities of the Island, are just under the 14 hours that it takes to travel the 1,145 kilometers between Barcelona and Vigo by conventional route; that is, in the few long-distance trains left in Spain that travel at 130 km/h instead of the majority high-speed ones, which connect the main cities at 300 km/h.
Pavlov spoke on Tuesday of an integrated plan that includes the creation of a unified traffic control center and staff training facility, but, once again, these aspects appeared in the 2017 project, which can still be seen on the outdated RZD website.
The Russian state company said it was in contact with the Cuban side and the financial institutions of its country for the allocation of a specific export credit for this project but did not want to give figures. In the previous project, signed in 2019, the amount totaled 1.88 billion euros, but it is expected that the amount will be raised, due to the logical price increase in recent years.
Among the improvements planned by the company is an increase in cargo transport capacity, which would go from 14.7 to 21.6 million tons, while the passenger capacity will grow from 7.8 to 24.3 million people.
It remains to be seen whether or not the project comes to fruition once and for all. The agreement adopted in 2017 and signed in 2019 between the two parties was shipwrecked in 2020, when RZD chose to suspend it.
“Regrettably, we have had to suspend our project of comprehensive modernization of the Cuban railway infrastructure due to economic difficulties and quarantine restrictions on the Island, but we hope to resume the work after the situation has stabilized,” Pavlov himself said in October 2020.
The news came a few days after the executive secretary of the Russian-Cuban Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation, Oleg Kucheriáviy, hinted at a massive cancellation of investments in Cuba due to non-compliance by Havana.
The agreement adopted in 2017 and signed in 2019 between the two parties was shipwrecked in 2020, when RZD chose to suspend it
The official told the Russian press that, of the 60 joint projects, only ten were being carried out, and he mentioned at a meeting of the Senate International Affairs Committee that the last session of the intergovernmental commission, which was to be held on the Island, was canceled due to the “silence” and “delay” of the Cuban authorities.
It wasn’t the first bucket of cold water thrown on the project by the Russians. Yuri Borisov, then deputy prime minister of Russia and in charge of economic relations with Cuba – he is currently responsible for the space agency – said after a trip to the Island that Cuban officials had a “Cold War mentality that in post-Soviet Russia” was out of place. “They are complicated businessmen, I’m not going to hide it; the mentality of the past weighs on them constantly. During the negotiations, in the positions they hold, it always appears that they are an outpost of the world revolution and we simply have to help them,” he said.
In this impasse, China arrived to fill the gap left by Russia. In 2022, the Union of Railways of Cuba (UFC) and Beijing Fanglian Technology signed “two letters of intent for the gradual recovery of part of the railway infrastructure.” Among the agreements, a recovery of railway workshops was planned that is being carried out, also with French investment.
Both China and Russia have continued to cooperate with Cuba in respect to rail transport, in particular by sending locomotives. But the new scenario after the invasion of Ukraine, which has relaunched relations between the Kremlin and the Regime, has led to reopening the drawer of lost projects. And the ancient Cuban train continues to chug along.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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