Kevin Costner Meets Cuba’s Figurehead ‘President’ While on ‘Underwater Archaeology’ Visit

American actor Kevin Costner on Monday met with the figurehead “president” of Cuba Miguel Díaz-Canel in Havana, the office of the Cuban presidency announced.

Díaz-Canel shared a video of the encounter on his personal X account on Tuesday morning, asserting that Costner is in Cuba for an “underwater archeological project” alongside Cuban researcher Alejandro Mirabal.

“Pleased to receive actor Kevin Costner at the Palace of the Revolution, who is these days in Cuba motivated by an underwater archeology project, along with his Cuban friend Alejandro Mirabal,” Díaz-Canel’s message read. “I told him about our people’s admiration for him; he said he felt very good here.”

According to the Cuban state-run propaganda outlet Prensa Latina, Costner arrived in Cuba last week, kicking off his tour of the communist-ruled nation with a visit to the museum at Havana’s Castle of the Royal Force. The museum houses historical objects related to underwater archaeology, some of which originated from shipwrecks in Cuban waters at the end of the 19th century.

Costner’s visit to Cuba occurred right as the nation’s barely functioning power grid completely collapsed on Friday, forcing the nation’s inhabitants to endure a weekend-long blackout. As of Monday, power had been restored to less than half of Cuba. Costner’s visit to Cuba and his meeting with Díaz-Canel appear to have been unaffected by the nationwide blackout, similarly to other official communist regime events.

The Cuban presidency, whose website is “under maintenance” at press time, provided a summary of Costner’s meeting with Díaz-Canel in a series of X posts on Monday. Those statements claimed that Costner felt “very well in Cuba and that he had been dreaming about this project for a long time.” The American actor also allegedly commented on his “special friendship” with the Cuban underwater archeologist.

“He [Costner] stressed that he had been impressed with the Museum of the Castle of the Royal Force, not only for the pieces it treasures, but also for its architecture,” the Cuban presidency said. “In the pleasant dialogue, the president invited him to visit Santiago de Cuba, whose bay holds a great underwater heritage.”

The weeklong trip marked the second time Costner traveled to Cuba and met with officials from the communist Castro regime in Havana. In 2001, Costner met with late dictator Fidel Castro during a four-day visit to Cuba. At the time, Costner and Castro shared a dinner and held a late-night movie screening of Thirteen Days, a 2000 American movie starring Costner based on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

“Those moments brought him the surprise of a meeting with Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz. About those hours, the actor would declare to the press, some time later, that it was ‘an experience for life,’ and that ‘in the world in which we live, I am always happy for the news that implies that we are getting closer and closer to each other,'” Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, reported on Monday.

According to Granma, Díaz-Canel assured Costner that he is “much admired by the Cuban people” due to his artistic career, but also for his “special attention to social and environmental issues.”

At press time, Costner has not published footage of his visit to Cuba and meeting with Miguel Díaz-Canel in Havana on any of his publicly available social media accounts.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.