OPINION:
Four months ago, this column revealed that Cuba’s military dictatorship was abducting and forcibly conscripting an estimated thousands of young Cubans to fight in the Russian armed forces against Ukraine. The oppressive regime, which has operational pacts with Moscow, has also deployed its elite Black Beret special forces units to fight alongside Russian troops in battle. Despite this, the European Union continues to send hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Havana.
The aid, which began flowing in 2016 as a result of the Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement, or the PDCA, is purportedly for charitable purposes such as rehabilitating agriculture, improving water and sanitation, reducing emissions, bolstering energy savings and promoting small business.
The EU boasts on its website that its aid has helped 20,000 Cuban civil servants, adding that its cooperative efforts on the island total “about 80 projects” worth 155 million euros. It says its cooperative effort “prioritizes the sectors of sustainable agriculture and food security, renewable energy and climate change, and modernization of the economy.”
The reality, however, is that the money Europe sends to Cuba flows through government organs, purported charities and entities that are licensed, operated or ultimately controlled by Cuba’s totalitarian regime. The oppressive government, which runs all of Cuba like a slave plantation, cares about one thing: money.
In addition to trafficking drugs and forced labor, Cuba is playing both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war by receiving millions in European “aid” while reaping mercenary profits from Moscow. Havana aids and abets Moscow in luring young Cubans to Eastern Europe with promises of lucrative work contracts and Russian passports; instead, these Cubans are conscripted into military service and forced at gunpoint to kill Ukrainians. Therefore, by sending money to Cuba, the EU is engaging in a reckless act of self-destruction by funding Russia’s war against Ukraine and the European community.
European aid, when considering other sources such as the Paris Club, totals much more than 55 million euros — money that could be used to rebuild Ukrainian hospitals, homes and orphanages bombed by Russia, and house children who have lost their parents to war.
Fortunately, since last year, clearheaded European nations such as Sweden have joined a new collective effort to terminate the PDCA. This week, a Cuban opposition delegation led by the Assembly of the Resistance and the Union of Latin American Parties traveled to Brussels to meet with European Parliament representatives and elected European officials in neighboring countries such as Spain in an effort to help Sweden make its moral case.
“Sending money sent from the European community to the Castro regime also sends a dangerous and harmful message — that Havana’s cruel oppression of the Cuban people is acceptable and that there is no need for the Castro military dictatorship to relinquish power,” assembly Secretary General Orlando Gutierrez told The Washington Times in a telephone interview from Europe.
“Cuba has become a proxy of the Putin regime, which is perpetually at war with the free world. As a Putin proxy state, Cuba has engaged in sweeping intelligence and influence operations against the United States, advised the illegitimate Maduro regime in its efforts to disrupt the Western Hemisphere, and forced its own citizens into Russian military service to commit war crimes against Ukraine,” he said.
For former Cuban political prisoner and participating delegate Jorge Luis García, aka “Antunez,”’ the matter is both moral and personal. Mr. Garcia, who spent 17 years languishing in a Cuban prison cell, traveled to Europe with Mr. Gutierrez’s delegation to tell representatives about the conditions he endured and how his loved ones continue to suffer.
“It is inconceivable that with more than a thousand political prisoners in Cuba, among them my brother Loreto Hernandez, that Europe continues to finance the dictatorship and repression on the island,” the longtime human rights defender told the independent news portal ADN Cuba.
The European Union and its 27 member states have so far sent an estimated $126 billion in financial, military, humanitarian and refugee assistance to Ukraine. While that number may seem to dwarf the hundreds of millions sent to Cuba, Ukraine used $122 million of EU funds to rebuild schools, while $907 million was used for more than 145,000 tons of medical supplies, mobile hospitals, shelters, school buses, ambulances, firefighting equipment and 7,700 power generators.
Redirecting the hundreds of millions being sent to Havana to Kyiv could mean the difference between life and death for some Ukrainian civilians and their children. It would also send a message to the Cuban military dictatorship that the European Union will not tolerate Cuba’s support of Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine, while offering much-needed assurances to the free world that the EU will not support any nation that aids and abets Moscow’s war crimes.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a Washington Times editorial board member who served as a senior adviser and director at the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting from 2017 to 2021. Last year, he was categorized as No. 467 on a list of 500 Americans banned from entering the Russian Federation.
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