AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis
At a meeting of the so-called “G-77” group of developing nations in Cuba this past weekend, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel rallied leftist world leaders to “change the rules of the game” and upend the existing global power structure. The event further highlighted how U.S. President Joe Biden’s reversal of former President Donald Trump’s hardline stance toward Cuba has emboldened the Communist regime.
Among the leaders who gathered in Havana were Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, and Argentina’s Alberto Fernandez. China, which is not an official G-77 member but has said it supports the group’s mission, was represented by Li Xi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee.
China’s interest in the organization quickly became apparent as the event became a platform for left-wing governments to bash the United States and call for the downfall of the American-led world worder.
“After all this time that the North has organized the world according to its interests, it is now up to the South to change the rules of the game,” said Diaz-Canel, who chairs the organization. Even though Biden has removed many trade restrictions on Cuba, Brazilian leader Lula also bashed the United States, calling its policies toward Cuba “illegal.”
Diaz-Canel’s comments came just one month after he admitted to Spanish journal Publico that Donald Trump’s policies toward Cuba were far more “unfriendly” than Biden or Obama’s. He specifically complained about Trump’s designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Diaz-Canel called that decision “aggressive” and noted that it limited Cuba’s access to international financial institutions.
In contrast, Biden has eased restrictions on Cuba, removing Trump’s business travel ban, expanding flight access, and allowing Cuban military-controlled financial institutions to handle money transfers from the United States (in effect ensuring that much of those funds are vacuumed up by the Cuban regime).
Biden also ended the Trump administration’s efforts to support Cuban dissidents, instead making a deal with Havana that allowed the Cuban regime to ship its political opponents off the island under the guise of a humanitarian visa program. The Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), one of the largest and most active dissident organizations in the country, warned that this “opening” by the Biden administration would create a “massive brain and youth exodus” and further hamper any necessary democratic transformation.
The effects of Biden’s rapprochement with the Cuba regime were illustrated clearly in a recent report from the human rights group Prisoners Defenders. According to the group’s findings, Cuban courts in July unjustly sentenced 14 dissidents to long-term jail sentences, bringing the total number of known political prisoners in Cuba over 1,000, including at least 35 minors.
Cuban courts convicted another 18 children for “sedition,” jailing them for five years. Thousands of other youth have suffered pre-trial jail sentences of up to a year. “This is a new situation – not even one child was charged with a political offense or saw the inside of a jail cell during the Trump era,” one Cuban priest who secretly assists prisoners told this author.
Under Biden, the Cuban regime has also escalated its repression of the Ladies in White, one of the oldest and most prominent opposition groups in Cuba. The organization is made up of the wives and daughters of political prisoners who protest by wearing white clothes while attending Sunday mass.
The group’s founder, Berta Soler, and at least 12 other members were detained last month in a new wave of political persecution.
The Madrid-based Cuban Observatory for Human Rights has offered similar evidence of political oppression by the Cuban regime. The group documented 90 cases of detention and 248 incidents of “other abuses and violations of rights” in recent months.
Those abuses include the continued imprisonment of UNPACU founder Jose Daniel Ferrer, whose family has been denied visitation rights for months. Ferrer, who turned 53 this year, is currently serving a four-year sentence for participation in the wave of anti-government protests which swept the island in 2021.
The last information his family received in March indicated that he was suffering from serious health problems due to torture, including starvation, poor ventilation, and sensory deprivation.
His wife, Dr. Nelva Ismaray Ortega, has reiterated that the Cuban dictatorship is continuing to violate her husband’s freedoms by keeping him in “an isolation dungeon, a victim of physical and psychological torture.”
Another example of psychological torture imposed on political prisoners is the treatment of UNPACU activist Luis Mario Niedas Hernández, held in the notorious Tarea de Confianza prison in Sancti Spíritus.
According to a Cuban chaplain, prison guards have ridiculed Hernández by forcing him to walk for hours around the dungeon carrying a bucket with some of his belongings. The chaplain said in a letter distributed by the Patmos Institute, a Cuba-based Christian group of human rights defenders, that Hernández has been “heavily humiliated and mocked by the jailers.”
“Soon after our friends in America alerted Trump administration to such blatant violations, the denouncement by the State Department spokesman and other U.S. official accounts were trending on social media,” a priest who assists the Cuban opposition revealed to this author. He added, “Cubans could see how the regime sweated under this pressure.” But now “Washington is silent,” he stressed.
While the Biden administration has indeed remained silent, Trump has continued to call the president to account. In a July statement, Trump asked God “to strengthen and watch over all the political prisoners and protestors being cruelly held captive by this evil regime.” He also accused Biden of betraying the Cuban people.
Two other opposition leaders in Cuba contacted by this author independently said that they saw “the regime’s foundation was shaking and even cracking” during the Trump era, while Biden’s policies stopped this quake. “We felt as if Biden, like Obama, was pushing us back to prison,” said one of them.
Now, it appears that Biden’s policies are emboldening the Cuban regime to go even further and now attack not just their domestic political opponents, but the United States also. It may well be that when voters head to the polls next year to pass judgement on Biden, they could also be determining the fate of the Cuban resistance movement.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
