The United States is committed to combatting modern slavery, especially since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was passed in 2000. The recently-issued annual U.S. Department of State's Trafficking in Persons
report acknowledges that the Cuban government “does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.” Yet, for the fourth year in a row, it was spared a Tier 3 listing, a category for the countries whose governments are not making significant efforts to fully meet the TVPA’s minimum standards.
Cuba is again on the Watch List (Tier 2 countries) for, according to the State Department, its “significant efforts” to combat trafficking by devoting “sufficient resources to a written plan that, if implemented, would constitute significant efforts to meet the minimum standards.” There is no clarification of how implementation will be overseen although the Cuban dictatorship persecutes human rights’ defenders, an independent judiciary and the rule of law are absent, and international commitments are systematically ignored, including the
Trafficking in Persons Protocol of 2003 (which Cuba ratified).
The TVPA defines severe forms of trafficking in persons to include: “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” There is ample evidence that the Cuban government itself runs a huge labor trafficking business; its own official statistics indicate that export services are the country’s largest official source of revenues since 2005.
The 2018 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report acknowledges that “the government is the primary employer in the Cuban economy, including in foreign medical and other overseas missions,” but merely states that this constitutes “a significant source of Cuban government income.” The last official statistics on export services are for 2016, when they brought Cuba over US$8 billion net of tourism. Although this was a considerable decrease due to declining in payments from Venezuela, it was still almost three times the revenues from tourism. There are, in fact, at least 85 state companies in Cuba devoted to selling all sorts of export services to governments or companies around the world in open violation of international law and the laws of most of the host countries. We have not found any comparative cases of state-run exploitation except for a similar scheme by North Korea (although its magnitude is unknown).
The exploitation of Cuba’s workers as export commodities is the most critical element to the material sustenance of the repressive, intelligence, and propaganda apparatuses that together keep Cuba's dictatorial regime in power. It also allows Cuba to exert undue political influence in international organizations and with many host governments, as export workers are used as a tool to strengthen political and economic ties and obtain assistance, loans, investments, and markets for Cuba's exports in favorable terms.
The TIP 2018 report does indicate that “some participants in foreign medical missions, as well as other sources, allege that Cuban officials force or coerce participation in the program,” and that the Cuban government "acknowledges that it withholds passports of overseas medical personnel in Venezuela.” Furthermore, it acknowledges: “There are also claims about substandard working and living conditions in some countries. Observers noted Cuban authorities coerced some participants to remain in the program, including by allegedly withholding their passports, restricting their movement, using “minders” to monitor participants outside of work, threatening to revoke their medical licenses, retaliate against their family members in Cuba if participants leave the program, or impose exile if participants didn’t return to Cuba as directed by government supervisors.” The State Department's decision to not list Cuba as a Tier 3 country, thus, appears to disregard all this. What's more, the practices are systematic rather than sporadic or exceptional.
Cuba’s brand of health diplomacy is possible only in a totalitarian state that exerts full control over all medical professionals and, thus, guarantees a steady pool (inventory) of captive temporary workers for export in conditions of servitude. For several years, Cuba Archive has reported to TIP officials at the State Department that, based on extensive documentation and interviews with victims, grave human rights' violations are perpetrated on Cuban workers sent abroad. Cuba Archive has also urged TIP officials to review the visa applications at U.S. embassies all over the world of individuals abandoning Cuba’s “internationalist missions” and/or to conduct interviews with some of the thousands of these workers who have found refuge in the U.S. and are free from coercion. Many have their families in Cuba and will not speak freely even when abroad for fear of reprisals, but in fall of 2017, the group
No Somos Desertores formed with thousands of members among Cuban so-called “deserters” denied access to their loved ones and their country.
Finally, although Cuba Archive’s work is not on sex trafficking or forced labor inside Cuba, it has received reports that these are problems whose gravity the TIP 2018 report also seems to have disregarded.
See our newly published 4-page Fact Sheet
on Cuba's labor trafficking business:
Revenues to Cuba
Conditions of service of the workers
International law violations
Dangers to host countries
International security concernsNegative impact on Cuba’s populationFind more links to Cuba Archive's work on this issue here.
No comments:
Post a Comment