“The Communist Cuban regime continues to pose a deep multifaceted threat to U.S. national security and hemispheric stability,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a press statement. He pointed to the recently released State Department report, “Cuba, the Capital of 21st Century Communism,” which details seven decades of the Cuban regime’s subversion.
In response, Secretary Rubio designated four entities associated with sanctions evasion efforts linked to U.S.-designated Grupo De Administración Empresarial S.A., three entities operating in Cuba’s energy sector, and two entities and two individuals responsible for the exploitation and forced labor of Cuban medical workers through the regime’s overseas medical brigades.
As documented in the Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, the Cuban regime has a policy of forced labor – a form of human trafficking – in the government’s labor export program, including its overseas medical missions.
Cuban officials exploit inherently coercive laws and economic conditions to manipulate or compel workers to join and remain in labor export programs, while confiscating between 50 and 95 percent of the wages paid by receiving countries. Tens of thousands of medical workers across more than 50 countries are subjected to this exploitation, historically making the medical missions among Cuba’s largest sources of foreign currency.
Cuba continues to pose a unique threat to the United States. “Even as its economy teeters on the brink of collapse in the wake of decades of corrupt communist rule, the Cuban regime’s fundamental objective remains the same as it was when Castro first marched into Havana in 1959: a hemispheric Marxist revolution that erases the United States from the earth,” the State Department report said. “This objective continues to serve as both the founding myth and the central principle of the Cuban state.”
“Today, Cuban agents and operatives maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups,” the report stated. “These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history. Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history – from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses – can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.”
The report goes on to note that Cuba has waged a revolution against Western civilization itself, in part, via the “insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. That is the campaign Castro launched in 1959, and it is the campaign his heirs are waging still.”
It is a threat the United States is determined to defeat once and for all, and sanctions remain a critical tool to do so.