This is the third time Diaz-Canel has traveled to this Southeast Asian country, having done so in 2013 and 2018, the first as a top party leader and head of State.

Prensa Latina stated that the Cuban president’s program will begin this Sunday with a tribute to the Unknown Soldier, at whose monument he will lay a wreath. The official welcome ceremony will take place immediately afterward.

Later, Diaz-Canel will hold official talks with Thongloun Sisoulith, General Secretary of the People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) and Lao President, and a meeting with Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone.

The Cuban head of State will also meet with Chaleun Yiapaoher, Vice Chairman of the National Assembly and President of the Laos-Cuba Friendship Association, and visit the Kaysone Phomvihane Museum, where he will lay a wreath, before returning to Cuba.

Diaz-Canel’s official visit to Laos concludes a tour that began on August 31 in Vietnam and then continued in China and this nation.

The historic and fraternal ties between Cuba and Laos, which established diplomatic relations in November 1974, date back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the first Cuban medical brigade arrived at the Viengsay caves.

The close friendship between their historic leaders, Fidel Castro and Kaysone Phomvihane, expresses the closeness and mutual political trust that typifies bilateral ties, based on brotherhood and solidarity between their peoples.

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