Russia and Cuba are on the verge of signing an intergovernmental agreement in the field of customs relations. According to Vladimir Malinin, who holds the first deputy head of the Federal Customs Service of the Russian Federation, who is currently in Havana, the main direction of joint work will be the fight against smuggling. Malinin arrived in the Cuban capital last Monday. And already on Tuesday, he sat down at the negotiating table with Pedro Ramon Pupo Perez, holding the head of the Cuban General Customs General Customs. It is expected that today the Russian delegation will continue negotiations with representatives of the island authorities and visit several famous Cuban objects. According to Malinin, the main issue of the meeting on Tuesday was the preparation of a special intergovernmental agreement in the field of customs relations. It is expected that this will be a document that will soon become a legal basis for cooperation for the relevant departments of the Russian Federation and Cuba.
Malinin noted that during the meeting, the parties presented each other’s vision of this extremely important and serious document – a document that would subsequently have to lay the foundations of further close interaction of the Russian and Cuban customs services. The Cuban side expressed a number of comments and wishes for the draft document. Russia, in turn, promised to carefully study them and finalize them, submitting agreed documents for signature in a month and a half a half. Malinin once again emphasized that the most important areas of Cube-Russian relations in the field of customs relations are the fight against smuggling and the exchange of statistical data. Malinin also complained that in recent years, Russian and Cuban customs services have not actively contacted.