Morocco Cuba Warm up Bilateral Relations
After restoring diplomatic ties last April, Morocco and Cuba are strengthening their diplomatic relations with a visit by Cuba’s ambassador Elio Eduardo Rodríguez Perdomo, who submitted his accreditation letter as an itinerary ambassador of his country to Morocco.
The Cuban Ambassador was received by Morocco’s Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita.
He also met Parliament Speaker Habib Malki.
Following the meeting at the Parliament, the Cuban Ambassador told the press that “what unites Morocco and Cuba is much stronger than points of divergence.”
He expressed willingness to strengthen ties with Morocco at the economic and cultural levels and extended an invitation to the African Kingdom to take part in Cuba’s trade fair.
The Cuban diplomat also extended thanks to Morocco for its support at the UN for resolutions calling for an end of the economic embargo on Cuba.
In June 2017, King Mohammed VI had appointed Boughaleb El Attar as Morocco’s first ambassador to Cuba in decades. The diplomat will took his position shortly as he was handed his credentials by the Sovereign lately.
The resumption of Moroccan-Cuban relations, which opens a new era for the two countries, comes after the private visit King Mohammed VI paid to Cuba last year. It was the Moroccan monarch’s first visit to the country since his enthronement in 1999 and the first ever made by a Moroccan king.
Since the 1960s, relations between the two countries soured as a result of Cuba’s backing to Algeria during the Morocco-Algeria military conflict of 1963. And in the 1970s, Havana declared its support to the enemies of Morocco’s territorial integrity, the Algeria-backed Polisario separatists.
Since then, Cuba has been providing the Polisario militias with military, vocational and educational training and was regarded as one of the separatists’ strategic bastions.
The decision of Rabat and Havana to resume diplomatic relations dealt a hard blow to the Algerian-backed secessionist group thanks to the royal proactive diplomacy, which scored another positive point against Morocco’s enemies in one of their high-profile strongholds.
