14ymedio, Madrid, 3 March 2023 – The platform D Frente [D Front] has lashed out at the growing close relationship between the Cuban government and Russia, after the visit to Havana this Wednesday of General Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council.
“This ostentatious public exhibition of Putrachev in all the news media is so obvious”, they say in their Friday news release. “Their conduct never stops being an offence against the dignity of a people [the Ukrainians] who have fought and sacrificed so much through their resistance and their independence in the face of all this [Russian] imperialism.
The Russian met with the Cuban Interior Minister, General Lazaro Alberto Albarez Casas, as well as the current president Miguel Diaz-Canel and his predecessor Raúl Castro.
In this, D Frente considers that one is now witnessing a “slow motion collapse of everything that signifies or assumes the ’project’ of the Cuban nation to be”. “Whilst the Cuban state and government openly opt to support an obviously aggressive war of expansion, even more destructive than strategic”, D Frente continues, referring to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which has just passed its first anniversary, “the Cuban people choose to flee from the country in the opposite direction from the spurious alliances of its government”.
That is, for the opposition platform, “an increasingly clear sign” of the regime’s incapacity “to represent the genuine interests and values of the country and the nation”.
“We Cubans do not support wars of aggression, selective murder, kidnap and trafficking of children or the rape of women, nor mercenary groups which destroy whole cities, as in the besieged city of Bakhmut”, says D Frente. “Nor do we support crimes against humanity or against a nation’s cultural heritage. We unwaveringly support the United Nations Charter in upholding the peace and in defending nations without an imperial past from the territorial appetites of future imperialists.
And they warn the government: “By supporting Russia in its genocide against Ukraine you are violating your own Constitution as much as international law”.
Patrushev arrived on the island from Venezuela where he was received by Nicolás Maduro, little more than a month after Díaz-Canel expressed his desire to carry Cuban-Russian relations to “a higher level”.
Days later, Russian media revealed that one of the agreements reached was for the creation of a “Centre of Economic Transformation”, with the objective of preparing “economic transformations in Cuba based on the development of private companies”.
Russian presence in the country is already a thing. For example, they are at the helm of one of the largest sugar producers on the island, the so-called Jatibonico colossus in Sancti Spíritus.
On the other hand, the fear of some organisations in exile, that this will lead to a “Russian style” opening of the market is also justified by the flourishing of new “private” businesses, created in a strange alliance with the state sector.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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