While Cubans inside the country suffer from food shortages and basic services and infrastructures are collapsing, the government – which usually blames the United States embargo for all this – hides that it spends fortunes on its external image, according to a report on ” the oversized influence of Cuba’, published this Wednesday by Archivo Cuba.
It is one of the reasons, for the Miami-based NGO, that the Cuban regime has not only enjoyed “historical impunity” despite the systematic abuse of human rights, but also that it has numerous defenders around the world and has achieved boycott the Summit of the Americas “thanks to his accomplices”.
Even after the demonstrations of July 11 and 12, 2021, which were followed by systematic repression, Cuba was chosen, as the organization led by María Werlau points out, to participate “in three subsidiary bodies of the United Nations Economic and Social Council Nations and has received many millions in direct assistance from dozens of governments, including democracies such as Switzerland and France, as well as small island nations,” some hard hit by the covid-19 pandemic.
“The big question is always how Cuba can have such great influence and how it has been able to go beyond international law. That (Mexican President Andrés Manuel) López Obrador dares not to go to the Summit of the Americas is because Cuba has a oversized influence,” Werlau told EFE.
“I went every year to the United Nations and looked in the directory (of the organization) who are the diplomats of each country,” adds Werlau. “I counted the diplomats one by one” in the ‘bluebook’, where you can find the list of diplomats by countries accredited to the UN.
Archivo Cuba also recalls in its report that the island generates its main source of income with the “export of its slave labor” in collusion with many governments and international organizations, such as the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization. .
In March 2021, the NGO points out, “Cuba reported 29,954 temporary workers in 74 countries” and during the pandemic it managed to increase these exports: “In September 2021 it reported 57 brigades made up of 4,982 ‘collaborators’ in 40 nations.”
The Government of Cuba “devotes colossal resources to maintain an enormous police state, a gigantic propaganda apparatus and an intelligence service that is among the best in the world,” says Archivo Cuba.
In this regard, he cites the “numerous and extremely expensive network of official international representations,” which includes 126 embassies, 20 consulates and 43 diplomats in the permanent mission to the United Nations in New York. This, according to Werlau, offers a measure of how “unwarranted” the Cuban presence is even “in remote islands.”
“Cuba has more embassies and more diplomats in New York than many much larger and more powerful countries, including Spain, Italy, Canada, Thailand, the Philippines, Mexico, Colombia, Poland and Peru,” cites the organization, which also indicates that nations with a population similar to Cuba in Latin America, such as the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Bolivia, “have between three and four times fewer embassies and about six times fewer diplomats at the UN in New York.” Belgium, the Czech Republic and Greece, whose population is also similar, Cuba Archive also compares, have between 40 and 43 fewer embassies in the world than Havana despite the fact that their GDP is much higher than that of Cuba, as are their exports.
These embassies around the planet not only promote “their geopolitical and economic objectives”, but are also “intelligence centers dedicated to recruiting a great world army of spies, collaborators and propagandists among diplomats, government officials, intellectuals, academics, artists, scientists, businessmen and others”, whose purpose is “to sow and nurture networks of solidarity in the most remote points of the planet”.
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