On September 4th, the Cuban foreign ministry issued a statement claiming that it has discovered a human trafficking network recruiting Cuban citizen as soldiers to fight for Russia in its war against Ukraine. The statement appears to be corroborated by earlier publications in a local Russian news outlet, Ryazanskiye Vedomosti, which reported last May that groups of Cuban citizens within Russia have signed contracts with the army in hopes of gaining citizenship.
The Cuban ministry has not acknowledged any connection with the Ryazan report, but it did condemn the mercenary recruitment of Cubans in any country and said that it was working to “neutralize and dismantle” the trafficking network.
Though Cuba has acted as Russia’s military ally in the past, it has vehemently denied siding with the nation when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine. “Cuba is not part of the war in Ukraine,” the ministry asserts in the September 4thstatement. “It is acting and it will firmly act against those who within the national territory participate in any form of human trafficking for mercenarism or recruitment purposes so that Cuban citizens may raise weapons against any country.”
As of September, the Kremlin has not yet issued a statement, but the tone of the infamously government-censored Vedomosti articles is overly rosy. One of the Cuban recruits discussed, a man named Daniel originating from Havana, is described as smiling and claiming that he “came to [Russia] to help the Russian army in a special military operation.” The articles make no mention of human trafficking.
The Cuban government’s combative stance against the trafficking is to be commended. Both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the recruitment of foreign citizens for participation in it are morally indefensible and any effort to bring them to a close is for the best. As Havana focuses on further intelligence-gathering and addressing the issue from the Cuban side in the upcoming months, it will also be important for other countries to aid in prosecuting the network’s members, as well as searching for the trafficker’s counterparts outside of Cuba.
In the past, it was independent mercenary groups, such as Wagner, that procured foreign recruits for Russia. Now that the Wagner group has been assimilated into the Russian army following its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived march on Moscow and alleged death, however, we can expect Russia to be desperate for new soldiers it can send to further advance its doomed campaign in Ukraine. Cuba is by no means the only place it will turn to for dubiously legal recruitment. A similar scandal has already broken out in Serbia. In January, videos surfaces of mercenaries from the Wagner group training volunteer recruits for combat in Ukraine.
The Serbian government reacted just as harshly as Cuba’s is currently, citing Serbia’s neutrality in the war and prosecuting people responsible for mercenary recruitment.
The invasion of Ukraine is a tragedy for more than Eastern Europe. Rather, the impacts have created a resounding global crisis, the ramifications of which will, for the next years if not decades, continue to affect lives all over the world. Although declaring “neutrality” in the conflict, like Cuba and Serbia had, is a step in the right direction compared to outright support of Russia, it would be naïve to believe that the war will not reach those who declare their distance from it. Hopefully, acts like the mercenary recruitment in Cuba will, while on their own atrocious, serve at least one good purpose: uniting the nations of the world against Russia.