The United States government once again included Cuba on its blacklist regarding human trafficking, an issue on which Washington and Havana openly have opposing interpretations.
Last year the island was placed in the most serious level of the annual report on the subject, published this Monday by the State Department, which includes countries that, in the opinion of U.S. authorities, do not meet the minimum standards for the elimination of this scourge and do not make significant efforts to do so.
At that level, the U.S. authorities also placed Venezuela and Nicaragua, two of Cuba’s strongest political allies in the region.
As cited by the EFE news agency, the report asks Havana to ensure that “government-sponsored labor export programs meet international labor standards, specifically that participants receive fair wages that are paid in full to bank accounts that workers can control.”
With this, Washington once again targets the island’s medical missions and, in general, professional cooperation with other countries in other sectors, which brings income to the Caribbean country and has been questioned by NGOs, opposition activists, and the U.S. government itself.
The Cuban authorities, for their part, claim to have “zero tolerance” for human trafficking and defend the “humanistic character” of their medical program, mainly in countries of the so-called Third World, although also in other more developed ones such as Italy and Qatar.
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Furthermore, they consider that the accusations against Cuba respond to a political motivation.
Along these lines, after the U.S. report was released this Monday, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez pointed out that Washington’s “unilateral and arbitrary reports only seek to maintain and justify a criminal policy of economic asphyxiation against the Cuban people.”
#Cuba mantiene una política de tolerancia cero frente la trata de personas.
Continua inclusión de nuestro país en informes unilaterales y arbitrarios de gobierno de EEUU solo pretenden mantener y justificar política criminal de asfixia económica contra el pueblo cubano. pic.twitter.com/2b99ezfICi
— Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) June 24, 2024
More from the report
Regarding Nicaragua, the Washington report maintains that the government of Daniel Ortega “continued to minimize the seriousness of the problem” and did not identify any victims of trafficking for the second consecutive year, nor prosecute or convict any trafficker.
Meanwhile, it asks Venezuela to investigate and prosecute traffickers and their accomplices, involved in child sex trafficking, the recruitment or use of children by NSAG or other illegal armed groups, trafficking of men and LGTBIQ+ people.
The report highlights that in the Western Hemisphere (North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean) there are broad commonalities in the trafficking trends that countries face. In this case, they are usually related to irregular immigration.
The report noted that unprecedented irregular migration in the region affects all countries in the Western Hemisphere and that migrants and asylum seekers are especially vulnerable to sex trafficking and forced labor, even by organized criminal groups, large and small.
Generally speaking, the report states, that in many countries, there is political will to address human trafficking about sex trafficking, but there are weak efforts aimed at combating forced labor.
Thus, labor inspections are underfunded and understaffed and typically have limited or no authority to inspect informal sector workplaces where many victims are exploited, especially along shifting migration routes.
This year the report focuses on human traffickers’ use of increasingly “sophisticated” technology and online methods to recruit, control, market and exploit vulnerable people while evading detection.
Traffickers, for example, use the Internet to advertise and sell children online for sex, advertise fake jobs on social media platforms that are actually human trafficking schemes, transfer cryptocurrency to other traffickers, and perpetuate online scam operations.
EFE/OnCuba
