Note: Correction appended.

UNITED NATIONS — With Fidel Castro openly relishing the prospect of a second missile crisis and a renewed confrontation with America, Russia is denying a report that it will deploy nuclear bombers on the communist island.

At the United Nations, home to some of the most memorable scenes of the Cold War, Russian diplomats yesterday referred reporters to a statement from the Russian Defense Ministry refuting the report in the Russian daily Izvestia.

“We see this sort of anonymous allegation as disinformation and another media hoax,” a spokesman for the ministry, Ilshat Baichurin, said in the statement.

Earlier this week, Izvestia quoted an anonymous Russian air force official as saying crews had arrived in Cuba to lay the groundwork for the deployment of Tu-160 White Swan and Tu-95 Bear nuclear bombers on the island, as part of a Russian plan to counter America’s proposed missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

Venezuela and Algeria also could be used as bases for the supersonic Russian jets, the newspaper reported.

“I think we should stand strong and indicate that that is something that crosses a threshold, crosses a red line,” the Bush administration’s nominee to become Air Force chief of staff, General Norton Schwartz, told the Senate this week. He warned Russia not to deploy nuclear bombers on Cuba as a countermeasure to America’s planned antimissile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

In his “Reflexiones de Fidel” column, posted yesterday on a government Web site, Mr. Castro praised his brother, Raul, for not commenting on the Izvestia article.

Cuba does not need to explain, give excuses, or apologize, the 81-year-old first secretary of the island’s Communist Party wrote. “You need nerves of steel in these times of genocide, and Cuba has them,” he added. “The empire knows it.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, said.

Asked whether he planned to bang a shoe on the table at the U.N. Security Council, Mr. Churkin noted that the famed Nikita Khrushchev incident, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, took place at the General Assembly.

The ambassador noted that according to recent Russian reports, the Soviet leader actually brought an extra shoe with him to use as a prop at the assembly debate, suggesting that one of the most notable moments of the Cold War was preplanned.

Correction:
October 12, 1960, was the date of the Nikita Khrushchev shoe-banging incident at the U.N. General Assembly. An article in the July 25 issue of The New York Sun misstated the date.