MEXICO CITY Apr 13 Cuban leader Miguel Diaz — On the anniversary of the first space flight, Canel urged to tell his grandchildren about it — inspired by friendship with Yuri Gagarin, the Cubans also sent an astronaut into orbit.
«Let's tell our grandchildren about the miracle of April 12, 1961: Soviet socialism raised a man from the people into space. This man was our friend and inspired thousands of young Cubans. Cuban socialism made this dream come true,» the politician wrote on Twitter.
Sixty-two years ago, on April 12, 1961, Gagarin made the world's first space flight on the Vostok spacecraft, lasting 106 minutes. During his trip to Havana on July 26, 1961, Gagarin said that one day a Cuban would also fly into space.
The only Cuban and the first Latin American cosmonaut, General Arnaldo Tamayo, was at that moment an 18-year-old boy who was going to undergo flight training in the USSR. In 1980, Tamayo, together with Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, went into space on the Soyuz-38 spacecraft. After docking with the Salyut-6 station, Tamayo and Romanenko studied the causes of the adaptation syndrome in space, the flight lasted 7 days.