Overview
Cuba received four Project 1265E minesweepers.
Developed for Cuban Revolutionary Navy, Cuban Project 1265E / Sonya class belongs to the Mine warfare vessels family and is associated with Cold War and Post-Cold War. Its documented designations include Minesweeper and Mine countermeasures vessel, while its intended roles include Minesweeping, Mine hunting, and Mine countermeasures.
Development and construction
This branch preserves export-built vessels and transferred Soviet hulls as distinct cases while linking them to the parent Soviet design family.
The documented program for Cuban Project 1265E / Sonya class lists 4 planned, 4 ordered, 4 laid down, 4 completed, and 0 cancelled. These figures provide the clearest available measure of the class's planned and completed scale.
Design characteristics and intended role
The surviving classification data associates Cuban Project 1265E / Sonya class with Soviet export mine-warfare design, Mechanical sweep, and Influence sweep. Read together with the recorded roles of Minesweeping, Mine hunting, and Mine countermeasures, these attributes show the operational problem the design was intended to address without implying specifications that the sources do not establish.
The class record identifies Cuban Revolutionary Navy as the principal design or service authority. Where individual ships changed navy, name, or pennant, those later identities are retained on the ship pages rather than treated as separate vessels.
Service history and class roster
The vessels carried Cuban numbers 560, 561, 570, and 578 after Soviet export-yard identities BT-737, BT-738, BT-133, and BT-131.
The class roster currently links 4 ships. Named members include No. 560, No. 561, No. 570, and No. 578. The linked ships are associated with Cuban Revolutionary Navy.
Historical significance
The record documents the international spread and later national service of Soviet postwar mine-warfare designs without duplicating transferred ships.
Cuban Project 1265E / Sonya class is most useful when read as both a design and a group of individual careers. The class page establishes the shared technical and operational context; the linked ship pages preserve differences in construction, service identity, deployment, transfer, preservation, and fate where those details are documented.
Ships in this class
Showing 4 recorded class members.
Sources and further reading
- Coastal minesweeper — Project 1265 ↗RussianShips.info · accessed 2026-09-20