Tomos Lewis investigates how Russia’s embassy in Cuba has come to represent renewed ties between the two countries. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Havana is a city which boasts, after Washington, the highest number of foreign embassies of any capital city in the Americas.
Among the most totemic of those embassy buildings is Russia's, which has towered above Havana's Embassy Row in the city's Miramar neighbourhood since it was completed in the 1980s.
Listening to Tall Stories, a Monocle production brought to you by the team behind the Urbanist.
I'm Andrew Tuck.
In this episode, Thomas Lewis investigates how Russia's embassy in Cuba has come to represent renewed ties between the two countries.
Earlier this summer I was on my way in the back of a bright turquoise classic taxi to meet Switzerland's ambassador to Cuba.
I was meeting him for an interview on his official residence in Havana, designed by the revered Austrian American modernist architect Richard Neutra in the late 1950s for the current issue of Monocle magazine.
And as I mulled the questions I was going to ask the ambassador during my tour of his residence, it was another landmark of Havana's diplomatic architecture that interrupted my train of thought.
Look, the driver said as the antique car rolled along Havana's wide Fifth Avenue with is known informally as Embassy Row due to the large number of foreign diplomatic outposts that line it.
It's the Russian embassy, he said.
I turn to peer out of the back window at the embassy's towering silhouette.
It is still 40 years or so since it was completed back in 1985, a building that has the ability to evoke a sense of awe.
It looms above the lower slung classic Spanish era mansions which house other countries embassies that line the boulevard on which it sits.
The complex, when it opened, served first as the Soviet Union's official outpost in Cuba during what many on the island still feel was something of a heyday in relations between the two socialist countries.
It became Russia's embassy upon the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The embassy building was designed by the Soviet architect Alexander Rochegov, who would go on to become president of the prestigious Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction sciences during the 1990s.
It still dominates the skyline.
Its tower, clad in light stone, has long been likened to the handle of a sword that's been plunged into the ground that, depending on your point of view on the relationship between Havana and Moscow, was either a metaphor for the Soviets claim over Cuba as effectively a Soviet satellite state during the years of the Cold War, or it's sometimes seen as a beacon of sorts, representing the prosperity that Soviet revenues brought Cuba and economic archery that closed up for Cuba during the 1990s an economic downturn which is still referred to on the island as the so called special period.
But in the past few years, Russia's relationship with Cuba has undergone a public renewal as both countries grapple with the effects of deep US Sanctions on their respective economies and restrictions on where Russian tourists can visit, for example, which was implemented in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has seen tourism too Key Cuba from Russia boom in the past year alone, 66,000 Russian tourists visited Cuba in the first three months of this year.
That's double the number that visited during the same period a year ago.