Will Castro regime use new internet censorship law to target Cuban doctors who spoke out on public health system collapse in Cuba?

 Providing some context to a troubling question.

Castro's PM Marrero tried to scapegoat Cuban doctors, but they pushed back

Earlier version found here.

Frances Robles reporting in The New York Times described how "after Cuba’s prime minister, Manuel Marrero Cruz, said that Cubans were complaining more about doctors and their poor service than they were about the shortages ... nearly two dozen young physicians and medical students took to social media to state, one by one: “I am publicly declaring that doctors are not to blame for the collapse of the public health system.”

Sarah Marsh of Reuters described it as a "rare public denunciation of conditions in the island's hallowed health care system" and made reference to consequences for speaking out critically, but did not provide a specific example. 

There are more than one. Here are three well documented cases of doctors who spoke out. The first being abroad didn't suffer consequences. Two others were not so lucky.

Ernesto Londoño reported on September 29, 2017 in The New York Times that "scores of Cuban doctors working overseas to make money for their families and their country are suing to break ranks with the Cuban government, demanding to be released from what one judge called a 'form of slave labor.'" Further on in the same article appears the following powerful quote. “When you leave Cuba for the first time, you discover many things that you had been blind to,” said Yaili Jiménez Gutierrez, one of the doctors who filed suit. “There comes a time when you get tired of being a slave.” 

Dr. Omar del Pozo

Dr Omar del Pozo, a 47-year-old physician and prisoner of conscience, was imprisoned in 1992 and sentenced to a 15-year prison sentence in Combinado del Este Prison for “revealing state secrets”. Amnesty International in 1997 expressed "concern that according to the latest reports his health has deteriorated and in addition to suffering from high blood pressure, apical abscesses, a stomach ulcer and heart and kidney problems, he is also suffering from malnutrition. He is reported to have received harsh treatment and lack of medical treatment in prison."  

Desi Mendoza Rivero, a 43-year-old doctor and father of four children, was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment in connection with his critique of the authorities' handling of a dengue fever epidemic in Cuba in 1997. Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience, and eventually he was able to leave prison for forced exile in Spain.

Doctors speaking out today, like Dr. del Pozo, and Dr. Mendoza Rivero in the past, risk prison sentences for what they have done.  

Giving voice to "fake news" in Cuba, disseminating it, publishing offensive messages or defamations that harm "the prestige of the country" are now a crime. The Castro regime with its own history of propagating fake news decides who is "guilty" of it over social media. This new decree issued by the dictatorship entered into force today, Wednesday, August 18, 2021. Decree-Law 35 penalizes "ethical and social" harm done "or incidents of aggression " on social media, reported 14ymedio yesterday. The text entering into force was approved back on April 13, 2021, but the content was not known until Tuesday, August 17, 2021 noted 14ymedio.

Among its novelties, this ministerial decree contains the "classification of incidents of cybersecurity and their level of dangerousness", such as the "dissemination of false news, offensive messages, defamation with an impact on the prestige of the country." The level of dangerousness is classified as "high" in Annex II taken from the regime's Gaceta Oficial and reproduced below.

The claims made in the media that Decree-Law 35 is the first cybersecurity law passed in Cuba are wrong. This is the latest Decree passed to restrict speech on the internet, with some new elements but not the first. Decree 370 issued by the Cuban government on July 4, 2019 threatens fines and imprisonment for any Cubans expressing themselves over the internet in a manner that the authorities find objectionable. The decree also prohibits foreign web hosting while law existing prior to Decree 370 already prohibited critical content on domestic servers. Less than a year later on May 6, 2020 over forty national and international NGOs signed a joint statement denouncing the consequences of Decree 370.

Although repression of freedom of expression and freedom of press has been long-standing and systematic, the current wave of repression has been intensified by the application of Legal Decree 370 “ON THE COMPUTERIZATION OF CUBAN SOCIETY,” in force since July 4, 2019. At least 30 people have been subjected to interrogation, threats, and seizure of work equipment (especially that of journalists) for broadcasting their opinions on social media, 20 have been victims of 3,000-peso fines (120 US dollars), an amount triple the average monthly salary. Failure to pay these fines constitutes a crime punishable by six months in prison, a systematic approach that has enabled the Cuban State to sentence 7 civil society actors who are currently in prison.

The totalitarian nature of repression in Cuba has not changed in decades nor the efforts of the dictatorship to ever perfect their panopticon on a national scale. What changed was the spontaneous protest of tens of thousands of Cubans across more than 50 cities and towns, knowing what awaited them, shouting that they were not afraid, down with the dictatorship, down with communism and homeland and life. The brutal and violent response by the dictatorship that still continues and is reflected in this new legislation is not new, but the widespread resistance to it is.

The future of these Cuban doctors who spoke out will depend in large part to the vigilance of the international community, and the response of Cubans on the island.

Repression is not new, but the refusal of Cubans to continue tolerating it is. Witnessing the events across Cuba that began on July 11, 2021 with a national cry of defiance that brought to mind the words of Frederick Douglass: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

Human Trafficking Awareness Day, the Obama White House, and politicizing human trafficking reports

Setting the record straight

The White House seeking to placate despots politicized the State Dept's trafficking report

 The Obama White House politicized the Trafficking in Persons Report of the State Department, undermining the credibility of the report, and months later on January 12, 2017 shut the door on Cuban refugees and migrants in third countries, victims of trafficking, for the Administration's political agenda.

This was part of an overall pattern, that began years earlier, of paying lip service to human rights but in practice marginalizing them to advance other interests.

President Obama closed the door on Cuban trafficking victims to appease Raul Castro

On July 27, 2015 reports appeared  that the U.S. State Department upgraded Cuba's status after 12 years from tier 3 to tier 2 in its Trafficking in Persons Report. Melysa Sperber, director of the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking (ATEST) expressed concern:

“We are very surprised by this year’s report, which seems to be making blatantly political decisions that we consider will have a really detrimental impact on both the integrity of the report and progress in the global fight to end modern slavery."

Kimberly A. McCabe in her book "The Trafficking of Persons: National and International Responses" wrote the following on Cuba and human trafficking:

"Cuba is a source country for women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation and forced child labor and has been identified as a destination for sex tourism. Cuban adults and children are also trafficked for forced labor in commercial agriculture, such as tobacco farming. There are also reported cases of Cubans being trafficked to the United States for debt bondage. Cuba's thriving sex trade caters to thousands of tourists every year from Europe, Latin America, and North America and involves not only the young boys and girls who are victims of abuse but also the state-run hotel workers, cab drivers, and police officers who may identify the commercial sex areas for those interested in participating in sexual exploitation. There appears to be little in terms of governmental help or nongovernmental organization initiatives to end human trafficking, especially sex trafficking, in Cuba. Again because of the closed nature of the government, the prevalence of human trafficking is unknown."

According to Reuters on August 4, 2015, in the Special Report: State Department watered down human trafficking report by Jason Szep and Matt Spetalnick, it is even worse than initially imagined:

In the weeks leading up to a critical annual U.S. report on human trafficking that publicly shames the world’s worst offenders, human rights experts at the State Department concluded that trafficking conditions hadn’t improved in Malaysia and Cuba. And in China, they found, things had grown worse. 

The State Department’s senior political staff saw it differently — and they prevailed.
A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, shows that the government office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 strategically important countries in this year’s Trafficking in Persons report.
In all, analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons - or J/TIP, as it’s known within the U.S. government — disagreed with U.S. diplomatic bureaus on ratings for 17 countries, the sources said. 

The analysts, who are specialists in assessing efforts to combat modern slavery - such as the illegal trade in humans for forced labor or prostitution - won only three of those disputes, the worst ratio in the 15-year history of the unit, according to the sources.
As a result, not only Malaysia, Cuba and China, but countries such as India, Uzbekistan and Mexico, wound up with better grades than the State Department’s human-rights experts wanted to give them, the sources said.

Senator Robert Menendez (D) of New Jersey gave a speech in October of 2015 on the Senate Floor concerning the trajectory of Cuba engagement policy that critiqued the White House's approach explaining that “in executing this new policy, the Obama Administration has spared no generosity towards the dictatorship in Cuba. ..." It upgraded Cuba in the trafficking-in-persons report despite its continued slave labor and human trafficking practices."

Yuriniesky Martínez with his dad, son, and on (right) how he was found in 2015

The Obama State Department's last TIP report (2016) despite trying to minimize the Cuban governments involvement in human trafficking affirmed that "Cuba is a source and destination country for adults and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor. Child sex trafficking and child sex tourism occur within Cuba." Furthermore reported on how the Castro regime "uses some high school students in rural areas to harvest crops and does not pay them for their work but claims this work is not coerced."

Not mentioned in either the 2015 or 2016 TIP reports are the killings of fleeing refugees in December of 2014 and April of 2015. On December 16, 2014 the Cuban coastguard ram and sank a boat with 32 refugees, one of them, Diosbel Díaz Bioto, was killed. Yuriniesky Martínez Reina (age 28) was shot in the back and killed by state security chief Miguel Angel Río Seco Rodríguez in the Martí municipality of Matanzas, Cuba on April 9, 2015 for peacefully trying to leave Cuba. A group of young men were building a boat near Menéndez beach to flee the island, when they were spotted trying to leave and were shot at.

The 2016 report downplays the claims made by Cuban doctors that "Cuban officials force or coerce participation in the program" by giving credence to the Cuban government's claim that "the program is voluntary and well paid compared to jobs within Cuba."

Cuban doctors trafficked and exploited by the Castro regime in a $2.3 billion business

Consider that the regime in Cuba, according to sources friendly to the Castro dictatorship place the number of Cuban doctors sent on "international mission"at 31,000. Other Cubans, also working in "slave-like conditions" have been sent abroad to work and provide hard currency for the communist government. In 2008 The Miami Herald reported that "more than 31,000 Cuban health workers -- most of them doctors -- who toil in 71 countries brought in $2.3 billion last year, ..., more than any other industry, including tourism."

Months after President Obama ended the program that offered refuge in the United States to Cuban doctors in third countries, who could reach a U.S. embassy, to placate the Castro regime The New York Times offered a different view. On September 29, 2017 in an article titled "Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’" with an introductory paragraph that indicted the Castro regime and reflected internal dissent among medical professionals the Obama Cuba legacy is forever tainted.

"In a rare act of collective defiance, scores of Cuban doctors working overseas to make money for their families and their country are suing to break ranks with the Cuban government, demanding to be released from what one judge called a “form of slave labor.” Thousands of Cuban doctors work abroad under contracts with the Cuban authorities. Countries like Brazil pay the island’s Communist government millions of dollars every month to provide the medical services, effectively making the doctors Cuba’s most valuable export."

Closing the door on thousands of Cuban medical doctors and dooming them to be exploited by a military dictatorship, where regime elites get billions of dollars, was a decision taken by the outgoing Obama Administration on January 12, 2017. It is important to set the record straight on Human Trafficking Awareness Day and on the eve of this lamentable anniversary.

Closing the door on the victims of communism in Cuba

The New York Times reports that Cuban doctors are tired of being slaves

Cuban doctors, like most Cubans, are tired of being enslaved.

Cuban doctors trafficked and exploited by the Castro regime

 Just yesterday I was justifiably calling The New York Times to task for a terrible piece on Communist China's record on women and in passing highlighted the paper's shameful past of covering up Josef Stalin's genocide in Ukraine and assisting Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba. Today Ernesto Londoño, the modern descendant of Herbert Matthews, managed to somewhat surprise me with an article titled "Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’" with an introductory paragraph that indicted the Castro regime and reflected internal dissent:

"In a rare act of collective defiance, scores of Cuban doctors working overseas to make money for their families and their country are suing to break ranks with the Cuban government, demanding to be released from what one judge called a “form of slave labor.” Thousands of Cuban doctors work abroad under contracts with the Cuban authorities. Countries like Brazil pay the island’s Communist government millions of dollars every month to provide the medical services, effectively making the doctors Cuba’s most valuable export."

This is news because it is being reported in The New York Times, that for decades has sought to spin a pro-regime narrative in its pages. In 2008 The Miami Herald reported that "more than 31,000 Cuban health workers -- most of them doctors -- who toil in 71 countries brought in $2.3 billion last year, ..., more than any other industry, including tourism. Most of them are paid $150 to $375 a month, a small percentage of the cash or trade benefits the Cuban government pockets in exchange for their work." 

Juan Alfonso, a Cuban doctor, living and practicing medicine in Chile, was interviewed by the PanamPost on October 15, 2015 and explained why he had to flee his homeland, "I will tell you something: I would have liked to stay in Cuba. I left because I could barely afford to buy a single egg to eat a day." The New York Times Editorial Board in 2014 was trying to spin that Cuban doctors were fleeing to the United States because of the Cuban Adjustment Act and a special immigration program that sought to exacerbate a brain drain in Cuba.

Londoño repeats the argument in this article to soften the cruel reality that "President Barack Obama in January [2017] ended the program, which had allowed Cuban doctors stationed in other countries to get permanent residency visas for the United States."

Londoño's article focuses on Cuban doctors in Brazil, appealing to the courts for the right to stay there, and Brazilian judges who view their treatment as modern day slavery. These professionals are spread around the world, but there have also been other cases of Cuban workers in brutal conditions not mentioned in Mr. Londoño's article.

In 2006 the case of Cuban workers forced to work 112 hours a week for 3 cents an hour in Curaçao made the news. The workers had been unpaid; their compensation was deducted from Cuba’s debt to the Curaçao Drydock Company. Three workers sued the company accusing  "Curaçao Drydock Company of subjecting them to forced labour in a lawsuit in US federal court under the Alien Tort Claims Act and other laws.  They alleged that the company conspired with the Cuban Government to traffic them and other workers to Curaçao to work for Curaçao Drydock Company as part of a forced labour programme."

Unfortunately in the drive to normalize relations with the Castro regime the previous Administration also watered down its report on human trafficking in Cuba, giving the Cuban dictatorship a pass. This drive was aided and abetted by The New York Times and Mr Londoño the fruits of which we are seeing now with over 20 diplomats badly injured in mysterious attacks and the U.S. Embassy in Havana effectively shutttered.

The New York Times article on the Cuban medical doctors revolt gives me some hope that the paper may finally be changing its ways, but the past 85 years also tells me to remain skeptical.

Response to President Obama's Statement on Cuban Immigration Policy

Obama's shameful legacy in Cuba 

 

On December 17, 2014 when President Obama announced his new Cuba policy I wrote that Obama's legacy would be one of normalizing relations with an abnormal regime. Over the course of eight years the marginalization of dissidents would result in the extrajudicial deaths of high profile dissidents such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and escalating violence against Cubans unhappy with the dictatorship. The end result, not surprisingly, is another Cuban exodus. We'd seen this before with President Carter and President Clinton, but the Obama Administration has gone further ironically going along with discrimination against Cuban Americans until it became an embarrassment in the media this past year.

They come not seeking the American dream but fleeing the Cuban nightmare

 The Office of the Press Secretary at The White House on January 12, 2017 released a "Statement by the President on Cuban Immigration Policy" that does two concrete things further restricts the Cuban Adjustment Act and ends the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program.

Once again the Obama administration secretly negotiated with the Castro regime and did not consult with Congress in restricting the Cuban Adjustment Act, which is US law. This is the second time that it has happened. From 1966 until 1995 The Cuban Adjustment meant that if a Cuban touched US territorial waters the Coast Guard would pick them up and take them to shore and they would obtain residency. Bill Clinton in 1995 reinterpreted the law to mean that Cubans had to touch land (dry feet) or be deported if caught in the water (wet feet). Now Obama has re-interpreted the law a step further saying that he will deport all Cubans who arrive in the US without a visa. This is a narrower interpretation of the law by the Executive branch without consulting with Congress.

Cubans, despite the rhetoric, do not have a special privilege but rather special circumstances that led to the Cuban Adjustment Act that unfortunately are not historically unique. The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act  was not the first such measure, the Hungarian Escape Act of 1958 granted Hungarians refugee status predates it by eight years. Nor was it the last, the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act of 1975 granted refugees from the conflict in South East Asia special status.

The Castro regime has long standing demands that both be repealed and this is the latest round of concessions to the dictatorship that will harm Cubans and will create chaos in South Florida because Cubans will continue to flee and go underground to avoid being deported to Castro's Cuba.

"Today, the United States is taking important steps forward to normalize relations with Cuba and to bring greater consistency to our immigration policy. The Department of Homeland Security is ending the so-called "wet-foot/dry foot" policy, which was put in place more than twenty years ago and was designed for a different era.  Effective immediately, Cuban nationals who attempt to enter the United States illegally and do not qualify for humanitarian relief will be subject to removal, consistent with U.S. law and enforcement priorities.  By taking this step, we are treating Cuban migrants the same way we treat migrants from other countries. The Cuban government has agreed to accept the return of Cuban nationals who have been ordered removed, just as it has been accepting the return of migrants interdicted at sea."

 The claim made by the Obama Administration that this is another step to "normalize relations" and that Cuban migrants will be treated just like any other migrant ignores the fact that Cuba is not a normal country but a totalitarian dictatorship. It also ignores the uncomfortable truth that medical doctors are treated like chattel by the dictatorship, sent on foreign missions that pay large sums to the dictatorship and a pittance to doctors.

Cuban doctors trafficked and exploited by the Castro regime

This is why so many of them have fled the dictatorship and sought a new life in the United States. The Obama Administration has also made this a much more difficult prospect to satisfy the demands of the Castro regime but cover up this cruel reality with the same type of propaganda spouted by the Caribbean dictatorship. 

"Today, the Department of Homeland Security is also ending the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program.  The United States and Cuba are working together to combat diseases that endanger the health and lives of our people. By providing preferential treatment to Cuban medical personnel, the medical parole program contradicts those efforts, and risks harming the Cuban people.  Cuban medical personnel will now be eligible to apply for asylum at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, consistent with the procedures for all foreign nationals."

Sorry Mr. President but you mistake your new chapter with Cuban dictator Raul Castro with the Cuban people. The sad reality is that you have closed the door on Cubans seeking freedom. This also includes Cuban doctors wanting to free themselves of being trafficked for profit by Havana around the world while they and their families do without. 



This is a shameful legacy.