A delegation of representatives of the Assembly for the Cuban Resistance addressed members of Parliament in Canada on Tuesday, encouraging them to reconsider Ottawa’s longstanding friendly relations with the Castro regime in light of its decades-long record of human rights atrocities and its staunch support for authoritarian Russia.
The Assembly for the Cuban Resistance is a coalition of pro-democracy organizations that work together, both on and off the island, for an end to the 64-year-old communist Castro regime. In its presentation to Canadian lawmakers, the coalition highlighted Canada’s outsized role in funding the regime through tourism and participation in financial aid programs, as well as the dissonance in Canada’s friendly foreign policy towards Cuba while taking a vocal stand against one of the country’s principal patrons, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Members of multiple Canadian political parties from both sides of the aisle attended the event.
“It is about time that precise questions be asked in the Canadian Parliament regarding where public funds given to the Paris Club of Paris by the Canadian government to benefit the communist regime of Cuba go,” Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, the coordinator of the Assembly, said on Tuesday.
#Cuba Urgent plea to #Canadian MPs in #Ottawa. It's time to reassess #Canada’s foreign policy towards Cuba. With escalating repression and the Cuban regime turning the island into the leading jailer of political prisoners in the hemisphere, action is imperative. The Cuban… pic.twitter.com/zl1z1qCFAf
— Michael Lima Cuadra (@ngotranslations) November 22, 2023
The Paris Club is an economic organization founded in 1956 by nations that hold significant amounts of public debt. The goal of the organization is to help countries with extremely high national debts find innovative ways to pay them back without leading to economic crisis or financial collapse. The list of Paris Club members is an eclectic one, featuring free states such as America, Canada, and Israel, but also Russia and socialist nations such as Brazil.
In September, Paris Club members visited Cuba to help the fiscally challenged Castro regime reconfigure a debt agreement it was on the verge of breaking, potentially leading it to default. The Paris Club forgave $8.5 billion in Cuba’s debt in 2015 – most of the $11.1 billion that Cuba defaulted on in 1986, but the Castro regime has continued to fail to hand over its payments when they are due.
Canada is also a major funder of Cuba’s through tourism. In early 2023, over half of all tourists to Cuba were Canadians – despite years of incessant pro-democracy protests on the island, prompting openly violent responses from the regime including the brutalizing of dissidents in broad daylight.
“(In normal years) far more Canadians enter and leave Cuba than citizens of any other country — including Cuba itself,” Canada’s CBC reported in 2021.
Cuba’s tourism industry is controlled by its communist military, through the holding company GAESA and its subsidiary, Gaviota, a tourism company. Tourism is so valuable to the Castro regime that the heads of groups such as GAESA have typically been members of the Castro family.
Speaking to Breitbart News, Gutiérrez-Boronat also addressed Cuba’s close ties to Moscow – and how funding the Castro regime runs contrary to Canada’s aggressively anti-Russian foreign policy.
“Canada needs to stop subsidizing the vicious totalitarian regime in Cuba,” he told Breitbart News. “Canadian democracy is directly contributing to the repression of Cubans and, furthermore – and incoherently – to a regime that is a pro-Russian belligerent in the war against Ukraine.”
Under the repressive Castro regime, Havana has enthusiastically supported Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine publically.
Vladimir Putin held talks with President of Cuba Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, who arrived in Russia on a working visit https://t.co/iId2PFF00s pic.twitter.com/yJMnSyUTgg
— President of Russia (@KremlinRussia_E) October 29, 2019
Covertly, a mounting body of evidence suggests that Cuba has sent its young men – as many as 12,000 of them – to train to fight Ukrainians on the front line. In August, a shocking video surfaced on social media, later verified by Spanish-language news outlets, apparently recorded by two Cuban teens who claimed to have been scammed into flying to Ukraine and fighting for the Russians.
“They told us that it was for construction, to fix up houses devastated by the war, trenches, rubble,” one of the two teens said in the video. “It has all been a scam. They haven’t paid us, we don’t have passports, we don’t have documents, we have nothing.”
“There were Cubans who received beatings because they wanted to go back to Cuba, in front of us by the Russians,” the other young man said. “Many Cubans are missing, no one knows anything about them.”
AméricaTeVe journalist Juan Manuel Cao confirmed the identity of the boys as Alex Vegas Díaz of central Santa Clara and Andorf Velázquez García of Havana shortly after the publication of the video.
After evidence surfaced backing the teens’ claims, the Castro regime claimed that it had uncovered a “human trafficking ring” independent of the Cuban government that had been scamming young men into war in Ukraine. The regime has not dropped its support for Russia’s invasion, however, and the Castro regime has a long history of sacrificing its young men in wars unrelated to Cuba’s natural interests, most prominently in Angola, where Fidel Castro sent 10,000 Cubans to their deaths to defend a foreign communist movement.
The radical leftist government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has enthusiastically supported Ukraine against the ongoing invasion.
“We’re able to see how much we’re isolating the Russian regime right now — because we need to do so economically, politically and diplomatically — and what are the impacts also on society, and how much we’re seeing potential regime change in Russia,” Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said in March, emphasizing that “the goal is definitely to … weaken Russia’s ability to launch very difficult attacks against Ukraine.”
The Canadian Parliament welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September, though that occasion resulted in an embarrassing incident in which the Parliament, and Zelensky, offered a standing ovation to a veteran of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS.
Cuba’s ongoing support for Russia has not resulted in any major policy changes towards the communist regime. It is also worth noting, however, that Zelensky’s administration in Ukraine also maintains friendly relations with Cuba and allows the Castro regime to maintain an embassy in Kyiv. Ukraine also maintains an embassy in Havana, but its representatives complain that they have no contact with the Castro regime.
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