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By Nathan ‘Jolly’ Green, June 29, 2020.

Comrade Gonsalves tries to join the Cubans every year at the embassy to celebrate the Cuban revolution.

Everyone in the picture is looking at the camera except one man, first to spot him will win a prize.

Kingstown, December 29. Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves celebrates with Cuban collaborators the 61st anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution.

The event was reported by the Cuban Ministry of Missions, Minrex. They stated that “the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, participated in a fraternal meeting with Cuban collaborators that served as a propitious moment to celebrate the advent of the year 2020 and the 61st Anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution.”

But from my count the majority of those there are either from the Cuban or Venezuelan Embassies. As for Vincentian collaborators, there are not too many of those in the equation. But, interestingly, they are described as collaborators. 

The term collaborator interested me, and I looked online at Dictionary, and it quoted this – “to cooperate, usually willingly, with an enemy nation, especially with an enemy occupying one’s country:”

Great so I can understand Ralph Gonsalves being a collaborator, but I do not think that the meagre splattering of Vincentians, the token people of SVG are cooperating with an enemy of SVG. Even Ralph does not see them like that; he sees them as? Well, I am not sure what he sees them as maybe we should ask him. I know he keeps talking about solidarity, and appears to worship their political system, he certainly seemed to worship Fidel Castro. I asked recently somewhere else if he is a member of the Communist Party of Cuba, still waiting for a reply on that.

I suppose he must be a collaborator because the Cubans wrote about this on December 29, 2019. So, he had time to read it and object, I have not heard or read of him objecting, so perhaps he is a collaborator.

Why anyone other than a member of the Cuban Communist Party would want to rejoice over the slaughter of thousands of people to accomplish the enslavement of a nation by the Castro brother is beyond me.

The late and widely respected University of Hawaii historian R. J. Rummel, who made a career out of studying what he termed “democide,” the killing of people by their own Government, reported in 1987 that credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000.

Yet the Cuba Archive, the Coral Gables-based organization generally regarded as the most scrupulous in documenting human-rights abuses in Cuba, uses a much lower figure of 7,193 (which, incidentally, includes 21 Americans, several of whom worked with the CIA).

5,000 or so were executed in the immediate aftermath of Castro’s 1959 takeover — after kangaroo-court trials, sometimes without even that — are included in nearly everybody’s figures. (Figurative talk about a balance sheet for the human costs of the revolution turns quite literal when the executions are discussed; for a time during the 1960s, the Cuban Government extracted most of the blood from the victims before they were shot, then sold it to other communist countries for $50 a pint.)

But what about the Cuban soldiers killed during Castro’s military adventures in Africa during the 1970s and 1980s? (The official death toll: 4,000. But a Cuban Air Force general who defected in 1987 put the number killed in Angola alone at 10,000.) And the county’s suicide rate has tripled under Castro. Should the 1,500 or so Cubans who kill themselves each year be included? If not all of them, how about the ten a year who commit suicide — or die of medical neglect — in prison?

The most significant number of deaths is believed to be those lost at sea trying to escape Cuba on makeshift rafts. For years, the Cuba Archive used an estimate worked up by Harvard-trained economist Armando Lago of about 77,000 rafter deaths by 2003.

All the people sold into slavery Worldwide, trafficked to all corners of the earth. Governments everywhere employing Cuban doctors and nurses via the Cuban Government. All those military adventures worked the same way, the Russians paid the Cuban Government a lot of money, and the Cubans paid the soldiers in seashells and beads. Well not really, but they got a mere pittance with the Cuban Government keeping the majority.

Currently, the Caribbean and Americas including Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have thousands of Cuban doctors and nurses between them; all paid small wages while the Government keeps up to 80% of what they charge for them. It is slavery; it is human trafficking.

We need some answers in SVG; we have a lot of qualified nurses sitting at home unemployed. Instead of training them to cope with CORONA virus, at the behest of Ralph Gonsalves, we bring in a load of Cuban doctors and nurses.

Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott has called to punish countries that employ Cuba’s medical brigades to help provide care and to classify such nations as participating in human trafficking.

Why human trafficking, how can that description be valid? It most certainly is a legitimate call because Saint Vincent does not employ Cubans; it has Cubans sent to SVG to work and pays the Cuban Government. The Cuban Government pay those workers just a fraction of what SVG pay the Cuban Government. That makes it a valid argument that these Cuban workers are trafficked.

Last week, Scott, joined by Cuban American Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced the Cut Profits to the Cuban Regime Act. If it passes, the bill would require the State Department to publish the names of countries that contract doctors through the Cuban Government and to consider that as a factor in their ranking in the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report.

The State Department has said Cuba’s medical program subjects’ doctors to “exploitative conditions” that are also “abusive.” Some doctors who have defected from the missions, and documents disclosed in Brazil, accuse the Cuban Government of pocketing almost 80 per cent of the money that countries pay toward doctors’ salaries, restricting their movements, and pressuring physicians to inflate statistics.

Ralph Gonsalves knows that the Cuban workers only get a small proportion of what SVG pays to the Cuban Government, so, therefore, is he compliant in the overall scheme of the trafficking of Cuban workers?