The Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba Denounces Russian Blackmail

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, together with his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Díaz-Canel. (Kremlin)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Manuel Cuesta Morúa, Marthadela Tamayo and Elena Larrinaga, Havana, 14 January 2021 — One more time. The Cuban Government returns to its arrogant genuflection at the service of Russian imperialism in its most archaic expression: territorial expansion. As it was 60 years ago, the discourse of sovereignty is nothing more than the alibi for the double ambition of absolute power and the global representation of anti-Americanism. It was what we were missing: once again poker with our sovereignty as geopolitical blackmail from a disruptive and global actor, whose only assets are hacking, new supersonic weapons and the flagrant violation of neighboring sovereignties. The Cuban Communist Party is a national disgrace.

In the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba we have waited exactly twelve hours for a tweet from the Cuban presidency or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs denying the declarations of senior Russian officials in which they advance the possibility, if it is not already a reality, that arms and armies could be deployed in our country and in our sister Venezuela if the United States insists on its defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty and on the expansion of NATO towards neighboring countries. And nothing. Silence of a government that boasts in front of Cubans and the world that is is the sacrosanct defender of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the peoples.

Russia’s threat is a triple humiliation that should outrage Cubans. Russia supplants the voice of the Cuban State by giving the world information that, if true, should have been communicated sovereignly by the Cuban Government. Russia disposes of the national territory behind the backs of the deepest interests of Cuba, and Russia violates the determination, announced to great fanfare by the Cuban Government, signed and declared together with other nations in the region, to convert Latin America and the Caribbean in a zone of peace. A declaration that we assume was deposited as an instrument in the United Nations.

Do the UN Secretary General or the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States have anything to say about this contribution of the Cuban Government to the strengthening and defense of peace in the region?

We Cubans do have a lot to say and do. Dozens of young people are being accused of sedition by the same government that humiliates itself and sells our sovereignty, once again, to a foreign power. In a design that, paradoxically, reflects the inability of the Cuban elite to escape its colonized mentality, the Government delivers Cuba in its most difficult hours to the dangerous combination of selling economic assets to external actors, of entering the geostrategic game of control of external powers and of depending on them for the basic survival of Cubans. All because of its pathology of power.

The Russian weaknesses of the Cuban political elite constitute the real danger to our national security. In 1962 it began as a silent tragedy that ends in humiliation. In 2022 it begins as a humiliation that can end as a tragedy.

Recovering sovereignty from the hands of a party that places itself above it and the State is the most urgent political challenge for Cubans. Immediately, the unambiguous criticism of Russian expansionism, the solidarity shared towards the Ukrainian and Venezuelan peoples and the condemnation of a mediocre and incompetent government that, instead of concentrating on the search for genuine solutions to the national problems of a new society it detests, it dedicates itself to playing like a little soldier in the new cold war between powers.

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