The “news” that Cuban troops are participating in combat actions on the Russian side in Ukraine, that comes well seasoned with melodramatic stagings, is grabbing headlines in the main counterrevolutionary media and their affinities in the world.
There is nothing complex about this new farce. The main objectives as usual are aimed at undermining Cuba’s support and contributing to the barbaric campaign by the U.S. government to discredit the island.
The Cuban Foreign Ministry’s (MINREX) statement issued a couple of days ago, sets out Havana’s position on the issue and clarifies some of the false matrices that the U.S. special services, the media conglomerates and mercenaries in their service are trying to sow.
It was not for nothing that they sent their star operator, Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, to Ukraine on a tour financed by the State Department. There is no one quite like him to act in front of the cameras and tell outlandish and fallacious stories, without the slightest embarrassment, against the land where he was born.
First of all, the Russian government, using its sovereign right, made public an appeal for foreign citizens who are in the territory of that country to join the Armed Forces for a period of one year, in exchange for which they could receive Russian citizenship.
Such a proposal is not an “invention” of Moscow, it is made by many governments in the world, including that of the U.S., which, by the way, does not always fulfill its commitment.
It is possible that some Cubans residing in Russia have chosen that possibility; after all the Cuban community in that country is not small.
Another variant is that, as denounced by the Cuban Foreign Ministry, groups of human traffickers are taking citizens of the island to the war front in Ukraine by means of deceitful proposals or frankly through an offer of payment for services.
The third “vision of the issue” is the farce staged by the operators of the anti-Cuban ultra-right, the Miami counterrevolutionary mafia and the CIA, which has invented that there are secret flights, even from the Varadero airport, to take Cuban troops to combat territory.
It is highly offensive and it is clear that they do it motivated by the hatred they feel for the Cuban Revolution and to deceive and denigrate, to claim that the island is sending soldiers in exchange for material benefits.
Those who know the trajectory of the revolutionary government know perfectly well how our nation acts in these matters; Cuban internationalist soldiers have fought in Africa against colonialism and apartheid, but the only thing that Cuba has taken back , with the victorious departure of its troops, are the glorious bones of those who have fallen in combat.
This smear campaign, like so many others, will end in the dustbin of history.
Raúl Antonio Capote is a Cuban writer, professor, researcher and journalist.