By
Nathan Green. October 05, 2020.

The
Vincentian people are sick and tired of being put in second, third,
or fourth place by Ralph Gonsalves and the Unity Labour Party.

In first
place is Cuba, in second place Venezuela, it is a tossup who occupies
the third and fourth place, but it certainly is not SVG, perhaps his
family and dynasty occupy those places. But it is the ignorant and
the paid Vincentian collaborators who have allowed this to happen.

The
Cubans were paid enormous amounts of money to build Argyle
International Airport [AIA]. But unlike a commercial contractor, no
formal agreement existed. That was a significant loss to SVG because
AIA was a three to a four-year project, which took the Cubans nine
years to complete. Had that of been a commercial contractor with a
commercial contract, the overrun time would have been penalised under
the terms of the contract for overrun time. If those penalties
existed, I doubt if there would have been overrun.

But the
same thing happened to the new specialist hospital at Kingstown.
Cubans built it, and again there was a 5-year overrun. Today they are
involved in running it, whilst our nurses must find work abroad.

Remember,
time is money, when there is an overrun on a project, it means that
the lateness of completion causes a loss of revenue and loss of use
of the facility. In the case of the clinic, perhaps loss of
Vincentian life because the Kingstown hospital does not have the same
facilities that Georgetown has.

Employing
Cubans via the Cuban government is tantamount to slavery, accompanied
by money laundering and trafficking. Those Cubans who worked in SVG,
and who are currently working in SVG were not and are not paid
directly. SVG pays the Cuban government, who then pay the Cubans
about 20% of those payments, keeping the 80%. They did not even pay
them their little part of the money in Saint Vincent; they paid them
in Cuba. That, of course, meant they had no opportunity of spending
their wages in Saint Vincent.

There
was no job at all that a Vincentian in SVG or from the diaspora could
not have done that a Cuban did. The difference being all those
multi-millions paid to the Cubans, instead of being spent by the
workers in Cuba or snatched by the Cuban government, would have been
spent in SVG. The damage this did to our economy is unbelievable.

Last
year a complaint by ‘Prisoners Defenders’ sent on May 10, 2019,
to the United Nations a formal complaint with all the evidence and
110 testimonies, two United Nations Special Rapporteurships, the
Special Rapporteurship on contemporary forms of slavery, including
its causes and consequences, and the Office of the Special Rapporteur
on trafficking in persons, especially women and children, are
taxative when condemning the facts, and have indicated in an
extensive report that “the reported working conditions could rise
to forced labour, according to the forced labour indicators
established by the International Labor Organization. Forced labour
constitutes a contemporary form of slavery.”

Also,
they indicate how Cuba’s legislation punishes with eight years in
prison for doctors if they decide to change jobs or not returning to
Cuba, and how they are prevented from seeing family members, or how
contracts are withheld, or how more than 75% is confiscated from the
doctor’s income, which “does not allow them to live with
dignity“, or how Cuba makes them work more than “64 hours per
week“ (160% of the maximum authorised by the ILO), how they have
restricted and monitored their freedom of movement and the right to
privacy or communications with nationals or foreigners, or how
professionals reported receiving regular threats from Cuban state
officials in destination countries and how Cuban medical women have
suffered sexual harassment, among many other violations that the U.N.
reports as happening by both received information submitted and
“first-hand information”.

The
complaint to which this procedure responds was drafted and filed by
‘Prisoners Defenders’, a European organisation whose leaders are
European, and this complaint initiative was funded entirely by the
person of its President, Javier Larrondo. ‘Prisoners Defenders’
detaches in this complaint any motivation except respect for human
rights.

Cuba has
NOT responded (consulted the publication on 06/01/2019 at 14:33
Madrid time), assuming with its lack of response what in the
international legal system is called the “tacit acceptance of the
accusations”, or “qui siluit quun loqui et decuit et protuit,
consentire videtur ”, that is, if he who can and should speak does
not do so, it must be concluded that he consents.

The
United Nations Report, which says that the Cuban government are
acting illegally.

https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=24868

Contemporary
slavery, also known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to
institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society.
Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 21 million
to 46 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and
the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of slaves
is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern
slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and
adequate statistics are often not available. The International Labour
Organization [ILO] estimates that, by their definitions, over 40
million people are in some form of slavery today. 24.9 million people
are in forced labor, of whom 16 million people are exploited in the
private sector such as domestic work, construction or agriculture;
4.8 million persons in forced sexual exploitation, and 4 million
persons in forced labor imposed by state authorities. 15.4 million
people are in forced marriage.

The
United States about a year ago called on all nations to stop using
Cuba’s medical missions, which send doctors around the world,
saying that Cuba refused to pay the medical staff what they earned
and held them against their will.

Cuba’s
international medical missions are a form of human trafficking and
modern slavery, U.S. State Department officials told a news
conference in New York.

The
Cubans have a health service that generates significant export
earnings by sending more than 50,000 health workers to more than 60
countries. Those workers are under guard, passports removed, paid
only part of what they earn whilst the Cuban government keeps the
majority. They are in very real terms modern day slaves, of a slave
master State.

In
Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro last year called the Cuban doctors
“slave labour”, and Cuba in retaliation recalled its 8,300
medical workers stationed there.

Ms
Ramona Matos, a Cuban doctor, seeking asylum in the U.S., confirmed
it was slavery when she said she worked with medical missions in
Bolivia and Brazil where Cuban security agents took away the doctors’
passports and other identification leaving them undocumented. They
had no identity cards or papers; if anything happened to them, nobody
would know who they were.

Nearly
all the doctors’ earnings [only 20%of the real] were sent back to
Cuba where they were frozen in accounts that they could not access
until they completed their missions, she said. All of this, of
course, designed to try and stop them from running away.

There is
no doubt under the Cuban system, doctors and nurses were being
trafficked, they are victims exploited and used by the Cuban
government as slaves. They are still subjected to this treatment in
Saint Vincent; we have a multitude of Cubans working here in SVG, all
slaves of the Cuban government, trafficked to Saint Vincent to
satisfy the political beliefs and wishes of Ralph Gonsalves, his way
of helping the Cuban communist party and government.

The U.S.
State Department has been carefully analysing where Cuban missions
are practising, which is in at least 66 countries. One of those
countries is Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where the prime
minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves is a Cuba system believer and is said by
some to have been awarded a Cuban Communist Party honorary
membership.

The U.S.
government has publicised its criticisms of the Cuban medical
missions so those host countries such as SVG “can’t say they
weren’t aware that this was human trafficking.

An OAS
report that Carlos Trujillo U.S. ambassador to the Organization of
American States, said Nations where the Cuban medical missions are
working need to end the practice. “Across the Americas, there are
multiple countries that continue to have these programs,” he said.

Ambassador
Trujillo said, “What we’re asking here is for a lot of the
countries ... who are continuing to traffic and conduct this type of
activities with Cuban doctors in their countries to please stop.”
But that has had no effect on Ralph Gonsalves of SVG, he loves the
system and cannot wait to be made a hero by the Cubans.

SVG
blatantly continues to receive trafficked Cubans and is fully aware
of how the Cuban government keep their wages and pay them small wages
in Cuba. We have a lot of trafficked Cuban slaves doing the work owed
to Vincentians. Nearly 50% of Vincentian people without jobs, 45% of
our youth unemployed, and we are giving those jobs to Cuban slaves
because our prime minister says so?

Our
people are enslaved in mind in SVG, no jobs, no work, and a below
poverty payments to live on. They seem to be viewed as a nuisance;
the leaders may even think they would be better off without them.

Several
ex-Cuban doctors who were part of Cuba’s work abroad program, who
fled and are now in the U.S., have filed a federal lawsuit in Florida
against the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). This
international agency brokered Cuba’s arrangement with Brazil. The
doctors said PAHO, a division of the World Health Organization, was
enabling the trafficking of medical professionals.

It is
time that the U.S. thought about sanctioning the people in SVG
responsible for employing the Cuban slaves, the trafficked, the Cuban
victims of the Cuban government. It is time for paying reparations to
the Cuban slaves, but first, they must be emancipated, and the slave
masters punished.

Then perhaps under a new Vincentian government under a genuinely responsible government, we can make SVG number one and get our people back to work.

END

DISCLAMER: The opinion, belief and viewpoint expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinion, belief and viewpoint of iNews Cayman/ieyenews.com or official policies of iNews Cayman/ieyenews.com

IMAGE: Supplied