Slave workers on luxury cruise ships at the service of Castroism

• Cuba "They pull out the girls' nails with tweezers"

Three years of investigations have deepened the accusations of

against one of the main tools used by the Castro revolution to finance itself at the expense of Cubans who participate in so-called international missions.

The organization Prisoners Defenders (PD) has gathered 1,111 testimonies from professionals abroad, of which almost 900 are protected witnesses.

This time it is not just about doctors, there are also sailors from luxury cruise ships, as well as sports trainers, musicians, architects and even waiters on

.

The cataract of complaints and protests gathered in the virtual presentation this Wednesday are just a minimal example of the abuses suffered by Cubans.

"They made me a contract with a sum of money that did not reach 25% of the salary paid by the Brazilian Government. They kept 75%," a doctor assigned to the South American giant summarizes in his testimony.

Everyone agrees on the complaint, it only changes the amount that the revolution kept for their work.

All this accompanied by threats, controls and ideological inducements, "political courses" to defend the regime, as well as manipulations in the number of interventions in the case of doctors.

The business is of such a dimension for Havana that it has finally become its

: 8,500 million during 2018. The government tactic, denounced on other occasions, consists of workers only receiving part of their salary (which varies between 10% and 30% of the total). The rest is kept by the State, something that human rights organizations define as slavery. The revolution, in its previous responses to the United Nations, has assured that it is "voluntary" work.

A great business that the revolution sells as "solidarity", despite the conditions it imposes on

, among whom the 35,000 doctors stand out.

Very serious threats weigh against all of them, of up to eight years in prison for those who abandon the internationalist mission.

If they manage to escape, they are declared deserters or inadmissible, which means that for eight years they will not be able to return to their country.

PD, supported by other organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and MEPs, presented yesterday the expansion of this criminal case, which has been sent to the UN Office in Geneva and the International Criminal Court (CPN).

In this latest report, the testimonies of Cuban sailors who work in the gigantic company Malta Seafarers Company (MSC), one of the largest in the world, stand out.

"The atrocities that are reflected are not only carried out in Cuba, although also, but in more than 100 countries that are signatories and have ratified fully applicable UN conventions and protocols. It is

through which, always protected Under commercial agreements between the Cuban government and third countries or their companies, Cuban professionals are coerced into abandoning their families for years and suffering serious violations of their human rights, during which time they extract the vast majority of their salaries", sums up PD in its report.

Consequences

The 894 protected witnesses who endorse the report have suffered the consequences of not bowing to the revolutionary abuses: all of them suffer from the 8-year law, which prevents them from returning to their country, despite the fact that 37% still have their children in custody. the island.

Currently, according to PD research,

.

Investigators from human rights organizations have been scandalized by the procedures used by the MSC, "which become an extension of the repression of the Cuban regime," according to the report: they retain their passports even when they touch port, to prevent them from escaping .

The "fine" for each leak is $10,000.

"Faced with the potential slavery that could have occurred on

, they assure that they followed the guidelines of the governments, and that was the way it was in the contracts. Where are human rights in Europe when you pay 100% attention to what requires a dictatorship? The situation is very serious and it saddens us tremendously that it is not the Cuban government that exercises slavery, but that there are also companies and other governments contributing to all this,"

, president of PD, stressed to EL MUNDO.

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