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 tak