MIAMI, United States. – Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel They led an event this Monday for the 65 years of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX), at the Havana Convention Palace. During the meeting, both dictators highlighted the defense that Cuban diplomats make of the regime in the international arena.
“Long live MINREX! And continue fighting as before, that is, well,” Raúl Castro exclaimed to the officials, while urging them to maintain the legacy of Fidel Castro and Raul Roa Garcia.
Díaz-Canel, for his part, asked the diplomats to “strengthen their ideological fiber, their modesty and probity, austerity and loyalty to the working people,” in addition to underlining that it is “necessary to strengthen the capacity for analysis, to promote the study of Law International, and to understand and defend, with conviction, the principles on which the policy of the Cuban Revolution and the cause of socialism rest.”
Likewise, the ruler highlighted “the prestige” that, in his opinion, the diplomatic corps has provided to the Island and pointed out the “countless pages written out of solidarity.” He called not to forget that the officials represent “a people criminally blocked for six decades, who have known how to resist, without giving up creating a horizon of hope for the dispossessed.”
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla also spoke and stated that he was “proud to have participated in the defense and international projection” of the Cuban system, to be “heir to the teachings of Fidel and Raúl” and to represent, according to his vision, to a “sacrificed and indomitable” people.
According to a report from the organization Archivo CubaHavana allocates considerable resources to its extensive diplomatic presence in the world, which in 2022 included 126 embassies, 20 consulates and 43 diplomats at the UN.
The cited report compares the 126 Cuban embassies with those of other countries with a similar population, such as Sweden and Canada, whose numbers of official headquarters abroad are smaller. Likewise, it points out that the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Bolivia, with inhabitants in ranges similar to those of Cuba, have between three and four times fewer embassies and nearly six times fewer diplomats at the UN.
Rodríguez Parrilla said last March, during the official program Round Tablethat two thirds of Cuban embassies are “very small” and that only “the head of the mission and his spouse” work in a quarter of them. He added that the “staff has to do everything,” including propaganda work, and that the priority is “the search for additional sources of income” for the Government, as well as “the solution in the best possible conditions of ensuring food imports, fuels.”
