Havana/A few weeks after publishing A report On the exploitation of Cuban workers that the Sherritt mining company maintains in Canada, Archive Cuba disseminates, this Wednesday, a new report that includes evidence that something similar happens in the Bahamas. The focus is on the company New Providence Metal Marketing (NPMM), a multinational subsidiary that operates in Nassau with Cuban employees.
According to Archive Cuba, the complicity of NPMM with Havana is undeniable: the regime appropriates 95% of the salary of Cubans at the service of the Canadian.
Although the organization could not confirm the information by another route, it considers credible documents and the testimony of a Cuban worker who was hired in Bahamas for three years since 2017. History reveals a situation identical to which other Cuban professionals of “mission” live to whom much of the wages are retained, they are subject to a political-ideological control through frequent meetings with the security of the State, they have limitation of movement, they have limitation of movement, they have limitation of movement, they have limitation of movement, “Kidnappings” of passports and the prohibition of interacting with the Bahamenses.
NPMM was created in 2016 to market refined nickel and cobalt products produced by the mixed company of Sherritt and Cuba in Fort Saskatchewan, Albert Cuba
According to the worker interviewed, the recruitment was carried out by the Cubanite company attending not only to his professional career, but also to his political loyalty. “The majority of those selected for these missions are members of the Communist Party of Cuba,” says Cuba Archive. In 2017 he was assigned to Nassau to work with NPMM and from the beginning it was clear that his employment situation was far from being normal.
After the contract he had to open an account at the International Financial Bank of Cuba to make the salary transfers
After the contract, an account had to open in the International Financial Bank (BFI) of Cuba to make the transfers of your salary and sign, without knowing the conditions, a document in which they only allowed you to see the space to sign your name. “If not accepting, your mission was canceled in Bahamas,” adds the organization.
As he explains, “NPMM paid this worker in Canadian dollars directly in her bank account in RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) in Nassau. From that account, she had to transfer about 95% of her net income per year to an account in Cuba in her name in the International Financial Bank, in which she could only deposit funds.”
Cuba archive ensures that the Cubans never saw their gross salary (without deductions) and that their Canadian dollars (6,100 USD per month) arrived at their bank account every month) after fiscal withholdings and payment to the Bahamas government, amounts that were never revealed to them.
“They only received a proof of payment with the net salary subject to the mandatory transfer after renting rental, services, gasoline and drinking water (whose receipts had details the organization.
In the end, and after sending the amount calculated by the company to the BFI, the employees were left with just 500 dollars, 5.3% of the net salary. Those who were also members of the Communist Party had to deliver the equivalent of US $ 32 per month to the Cuban embassy in Nassau. They were also applied an additional retention of 150 Canadian dollars who went to a Cuban account in his name in the disappeared CUC. In total, they could freely have only $ 350 Canadian dollars per month, about 262 US dollars who, according to Archive Cuba, barely reached to deal with the “high cost of living” in Bahamas.
The organization makes the accounts, which prove that the amount that workers received was abusive: “500 Canadian dollars per month were equivalent to a 2.91 salary per hour, for a 40 -hour work week. If they worked 50 hours, which was not unusual, the salary was 2.33 Canadian dollars per hour,” the report details.
When they were traveling to Cuba, a mandatory “vacation” demanded by Havana, the situation was even worse: they had to transfer 100% of their salary and change were deposited on the island 584 Cuban pesos, then equivalent to just 23 dollars. “Thus, for that month of ‘paid vacations’ I received the equivalent of US $ 0.13 per hour (calculated at 40 hours per week),” summarizes the document.
A year, the Cuban government stayed with approximately 96,497 Canadian dollars for each worker. Meanwhile, Sherritt executives, including Tina Litzinger, who was executive director of NPMM, knew about the situation, says Cuba Archive. “When Tina Litzinger held the position, she knew that Cuban employees were forced to transfer most of their salaries to the Cuban government, staying just to survive,” says the report. His successor, Robert Ellenwood, has maintained the practice, asserts.
As a consequence, at least three workers, including the interviewee, ‘deserted’ of the mission during trips to Canada
As a consequence, at least three workers – the organization said – including the interviewee, They deserted From the mission during trips to Canada with visa to visit Sherritt facilities in that country. To do so in Bahamas, the report says, they would have been deported thanks to the agreement between Nassau and Havana.
Already in Canada, several Cubans delivered evidence of labor exploitation in their asylum requests. The aforementioned worker was one of them: “It is not credible that the owners and executives of Sherritt International – even the Canadian labor unions – ignore the systematic theft of the salary suffered by many Cubans who over the years have abandoned the joint companies in Albert Cuban who leaves the mission or remains in Canada at the end of it – including engineers, counters or boughters/qualified vendors.
It also emphasizes that the Canadian company is complicit not only of salary confiscation, but also of other harmful practices: “Between 2014 and 2016, after employee protests and its union in Canada for the environmental and health impacts of the refinery in Fort Saskatchewan, a harmful refining process was transferred to Cuba”.
He also denounced that Cuba perceives the salaries that Sherritt pays to the more than 1,500 employees of his mines in moa In Canadian dollars, although that amount comes first at the hands of the government, which confiscated most and delivers salaries in pesos. “After the monetary unification initiated in 2021, it was reported that mixed companies would pay the official exchange rate of the Bank of Cuba. However, workers complain that they only receive 20% of what they should collect,” the employee alleges.
Cuba Archive adds that what Sherritt’s former employee is not an isolated case. On the contrary, “it indicates that Cuban workers destined for the Canada-Cuba joint companies are subjected to the same pattern of human trafficking that characterizes the ‘internationalist missions’ of Cuba in the world.”
The organization recalled that it has been denouncing these practices for years, which violate the UN protocol against trafficking in people
The organization recalled that it has been denouncing these practices for years, which violate the UN protocol against human trafficking, multiple agreements of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and other international agreements ratified by Canada and Bahamas. His most recent report realizes that workers sent to the Sherritt International refinery at Fort Saskatchewan receive Canadian level salaries but are forced to deliver up to 84% of their income to the account of a state company of the island.
As for Bahamas, the United States already caught the attention to the authorities of the archipelago for the conditions under which Cuban professionals are hired. In the specific case of doctorsWashington threatened to apply sanctions if he did not cancel the agreements with Havana and hired the toilets directly. Bahamas agreed and, last August clarified that he would take similar measures with the Cuban teachers that has still hired.
