On February 25, 2025 Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced ” the expansion of an existing Cuba-related visa restriction policy that targets forced labor linked to the Cuban labor export program. This expanded policy applies to current or former Cuban government officials, and other individuals, including foreign government officials, who are believed to be responsible for, or involved in, the Cuban labor export program, particularly Cuba’s overseas medical missions. This policy also applies to the immediate family of such persons. The Department has already taken steps to impose visa restrictions on several individuals, including Venezuelans, under this expanded policy.”
FranceTV released a documentary on evidence found in Jeffrey Epstein’s Paris apartment on January 29, 2025. Among the framed photos in his apartment are two of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, one with him and a group, including Epstein, another with a young woman kissing Castro with her face blurred.
Cubans in 2001 were not allowed to travel outside of the island. Fidel Castro gave the authorization for the minor to travel with Maradona. According to Mavys Álvarez, “the only way to travel was either with the permission of the parents, being at least 18 years old, or through Fidel. Maradona was able to get the authorization and she traveled out of the country in November 2001.
Diego Maradona, an international soccer legend, and enthusiastic supporter of the Castro dictatorship, could still have been targeted by the Castro regime with compromising photos to gain leverage over the sports celebrity.
Mavys Alvarez (then 16), Fidel Castro, and Diego Maradona (then 40) in 2001
The Cuban government’s intelligence service has a history of carrying out “kompromat”, called “honey traps” in English. “Kompromat” is “the Russian art of obtaining compromising material on prominent individuals in order to exert leverage over them,” according to The Conversation. The Cuban intelligence service was formed, and trained by both the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB, and have their own extensive history on this tactic.
British authorities had been aware of these practices and even after the Cold War in 1990 listed Cuba among “countries presenting a special security risk”, and among dangers cited “sexual involvement”, another term for “honey trap.” To achieve additional leverage the use of underage girls or boys (that do not appear underage) could be used to add a criminal element to extortion used by Havana. That Fidel Castro invited Jeffrey Epstein to Cuba in 2003 should raise concerns about what information the two could have traded in, and who would be further compromised.
There are also worrying episodes with Cuban doctors, and individuals who pose as doctors, but are part of the espionage apparatus.
The Cuban dictatorship and its agents of influence would prefer that George Orwell’s “memory holes” were a reality and not a literary fiction. In the midst of their continuing propaganda campaign to celebrate the Cuban medical missions sent abroad for profit and whitewashing the Castro regime’s many crimes, the March 17, 2019 article by Nicholas Casey in The New York Times, “‘It Is Unspeakable’: How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to Coerce Venezuela Voters” reveals how Cuban doctors on orders from their ideologically committed higher ups were ordered to provide patients needed medical treatment conditioned upon and in in exchange for their political loyalty. It also revealed that not all the folks dressed like doctors were doctors but just playing the role.
Even United Nations experts have called out the Cuban government for some of these practices.
Similar to the Cuban doctors, the shipyard workers upon their transfer to Curacao had their passports seized, and were monitored by state security and held against their will.
“The men were forced to labor in sweltering weather and dangerous conditions, like hanging from scaffolds. When Rodríguez broke his foot and ankle in 2002 while scraping rust from the hull of a ship, he was sent home to heal — and then ordered back after his recovery. […] Plaintiff Luis Alberto Casanova once suffered an electric shock but was forced to finish his shift despite bleeding from his tongue. The workers’ supervisors were other Cubans, including a nephew of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the suit alleges. ”They always told us if we didn’t work, they’d throw us out of the country, fire us and send us to jail,” Rodríguez said. “Really, we were slaves. We didn’t have a voice or a vote.”
The Miami Herald continued to follow the story and reported on it in 2008.The trio were awarded US$50 million as compensation and US$30 million as punitive damages in 2008, in a default judgment, and the appeals process has continued over the next 12 years. On May 27, 2015 the Curacao Chronicle, in the article “Slave labor victims of Curaçao Dry Dock get nod enforce $67million USA claim” reported that “the quest by three modern-day slaves for US$80 million in restitution has come to the Singapore port of call. Three Cuban slave-labor victims were given the High Court’s go-ahead to enforce a US$50 million claim won in a United States court against any assets that the Curaçao dry dock has in Singapore. The High Court rejected the bid by Curaçao Drydock Company to set aside the US judgment, making clear the claims were enforceable in Singapore as they were meant to compensate the victims, not punish the company.”
Alberto J Rodríguez, Fernando A Hernández and Luis A Casanova Toledo
The U.S. State Department has taken a positive step, but much more needs to be done, and not just by the United States.
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