A Russian military fleet set off from its Arctic Sea port of Severomorsk on Monday, bound for military exercises off Venezuela in mid-November that would mark the first such Russian action in the region since the end of the cold war.

Coming just days after supersonic, nuclear-capable Tu-160 bombers streaked home to Russia after a flying visit to Venezuela, the move evokes images of the time when Latin America was a prime theatre of US-Soviet rivalry, from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to the 1980s civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador.