Following a procession through the streets of the city's historic district, religious figures and Cuban government officials on Sunday laid down the first stone of what will become the island's first-ever Russian Orthodox church.
The church will constitute "a monument to Cuban-Russian friendship," said Metropolitan Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church's foreign relations department. He traveled to Cuba from Moscow for the consecration.
The church will also pay homage to the thousands of Russian workers, soldiers and technicians who cooperated with communist Cuba for three "glorious" decades before the fall of the Soviet Union, he said.
"The past can reunite with the present, with the result being a common future," Metropolitan Kirill said. "Russia will again be a great power ... that supports and defends its friends."
Cuba was a strategic Soviet ally in America's backyard during the Cold War. Under an ideological and economic alliance that lasted for three decades, Cuba once received about 20 percent of its gross national product from Soviet subsidies.
Sunday's event began in the old Roman Catholic Convent of San Francisco in Habana Vieja with a two-hour mass attended by about 300 people, primarily Eastern Europeans living in Cuba.
Havana City Historian, Eusebio Leal, and Caridad Diego, director of religious affairs for Cuba's Communist Party, sat in the front row of the church. Leal had presented the church project to Patriarch Alexy II for authorization during a visit to Moscow at the end of October.
Archbishop Luigi Bonazzi, the Vatican's ambassador to Cuba, and several diplomats were also present.
After the service, Metropolitan Kirill led the procession carrying Russian Orthodox crosses and flags.
"This is part of our culture, of our fatherland, of our soul," Tania Profet, a Russian citizen living in Cuba for 38 years, said as she followed the procession.
At the empty plot that will house the new church, Metropolitan Kirill filled a deep hole with religious artifacts, and covered the opening with the first symbolic stone, followed by cement and more stones.
Cuba became officially atheist in the years after the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, but the government removed references to atheism in the constitution more than a decade ago and allowed religious believers to join the Communist Party.
Relations between churches and the Cuban state climaxed in January 1998, with the historic visit of Roman Catholic Pope John Paul II.
In January of this year, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians, visited Cuba to consecrate a different cathedral built by the communist government.
The new Russian Orthodox church, also being financed by the Cuban government, is expected to open its doors in about a year.