14ymedio, Madrid, 28 September 2021 — The Spanish Justice Department has admitted to processing a complaint for for slander, insults and incitement to hatred by Javier Larrondo, president of the Cuban Prisoners Defenders (CPD) organization, against the Euskadi-Cuba Association, which supports the page Cubainformación.tv, and its coordinator, José Manzaneda Palao.
The complaint is based on a specific passage: “Javier Larrondo, a member of one of the families of the Cuban bourgeoisie protected by the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista is, like Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, a war criminal. And he should be treated as such,” it says in the article Creating a healthcare crisis in Cuba: objective of the war against its medical cooperation.
Published by Cubainformacion.tv with a video version and a written version, in several languages, in October 2020, the article aimed to deny a CPD investigation that had concluded, weeks before, that Cuban medical missions are the “great capitalist slave business”the regime.
Larrondo states in his complaint that the statements against him, for which he holds Manzaneda responsible, are not only false, but also serious and inciting hatred: the president of CPD, the legal document alleges, “has never collaborated or been protected by any dictatorship, much less has he committed or been convicted in any court of war crimes. “
In addition, the lawsuit continues, they were published with intent, based on the “political animosity” that the defendants have against him, motivated “by the activities and impact on international public opinion of the NGO Prisoners Defenders in favor of democracy and human rights in Cuba.”
In the same document, the plaintiff recalls that Cubainformacion.tv “publishes different information of an official nature, favorable to the Government of Cuba.”
For years, in effect, the platforms of Cubainformacion.tv have echoed the reputation-killing campaigns carried out by the Cuban regime against its dissidents. They have even disseminated private information, medical records and telephone conversations of opponents and activists, later cited in the official media of the Island.
The Madrid-based NGO takes advantage of the litigation, admitted for processing this Monday, to note, in a fiery statement released this Tuesday, that the Eukadi-Cuba Association receives grants from the European Funds for Cooperation and Development through local institutions (the Basque Agency for Development Cooperation, the Vizcaya Provincial Council, the Bilbao City Council, the Hernani City Council or the Guipúzcoa Provincial Council, for example). These are destined, says CPD, on the one hand “to the propaganda apparatus of Cubainformacion.tv directly” and, on the other, to delegations or “projects” of the regime, both within the island and in other countries.
On an official page of the Basque Government, Prisoners Defenders found that the Euskadi-Cuba Association received, from the Basque Agency for Development Cooperation alone, between 2015 and 2019, a total of 498,324 euros. “If we analyze this list of some funds verified by Prisoners Defenders, a very partial list with respect to the total, we see that the total that the Euskadi-Cuba Association has captured is a minimum of 3,885,897 euros, and only from 2013 to 2020,” he says in his organization’s press release.
Those European funds, the CPD states, are destined “to undermine Europe and its institutions.” The NGO bases its assertions on two articles from the Spanish newspaper ABC, one of which asserts that Castroism has infiltrated the Spanish extreme left and some radical independence movements and, the other, that in Spain and since 2005, fifty Cuban associations under the tutelage of the regime have received more than 400,000 euros.
“The regime supports these movements to destabilize Spain and Europe, which bring democratic stability to Latin America, as a very long-term objective, and to obtain funding and political support from these radical movements in the short term,” says Prisoners Defenders. It then continues: “If the Euskadi-Cuba Association alone, mentioned in this second article of the ABC newspaper investigation, has received many millions of euros of European public money since 2005, the amount obtained from European funds, whether from the Union, national or local sources, for all the organizations linked to Cuba, could total many tens of millions of euros, through Spain alone (imagine in the rest of European countries and the Associations of “Friendship with Cuba” in them!).”
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