Cuba’s communist regime on Wednesday rejected a plan by President Donald Trump to use the American military base at Guantánamo Bay to house illegal migrants slated for deportation.
On Wednesday evening, President Trump announced that he had instructed the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to prepare the Guantánamo Bay base to function as a detention space for 30,000 “high-priority” criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.
In remarks given after signing the Laken Riley Act in the White House, President Trump explained that the measure would immediately double the United States’ migrant-detention capacity.
“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the [home] countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo,” President Trump said.
The Cuban Foreign Ministry issued a statement Wednesday in which it denounced Trump’s actions as a demonstration of the “brutality” with which the United States is acting to correct problems allegedly created by the “economic and social conditions of that country, the government’s own management and its foreign policy, including hostility towards countries of origin.”
“Many of the people the United States is expelling or intends to expel are victims of the government’s own plundering policies and fill labor needs in agriculture, construction, industry, services and various sectors of the U.S. economy,” the statement read. “Others are the result of border facilitations to enter the country, of selective, politically motivated rules that welcome them as refugees, and also of the socioeconomic damage caused by unilateral coercive measures.”
“A significant portion contributes and has contributed to the U.S. economy. They are employed, have homes, have created families and have planned their respective lives in the United States,” the regime alleged.
The Communist Party also denounced the longstanding legal American presence in Guantánamo Bay as an “illegal” occupation of Cuban territory “against the will of the Cuban nation.”
“That military facility is internationally identified, among other reasons, for housing a torture and indefinite detention center, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, where people have been held for up to 20 years, never tried or convicted of any crime,” the statement read.
“Its irresponsible use would generate a scenario of risk and insecurity in that illegal enclave and its surroundings; it would threaten peace and would lend itself to errors, accidents and misinterpretations that could alter stability and provoke serious consequences,” the statement concluded.
The Castro regime’s figurehead president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, condemned President Trump’s announcement as an “act of brutality.”
“In act of brutality, [the] new U.S. government announces imprisonment in Guantánamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory, of thousands of migrants it forcibly expels, who will be placed next to the known prisons of torture and illegal detention,” he wrote on social media.
Similarly, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla reiterated the communist regime’s rejection of President Trump’s announcement in a social media post and rejected that the base’s territory “belongs to the United States. It is a portion of Cuban territory illegally occupied against our will.”
Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, referred to the announcement by accusing President Trump of allegedly taking the “harshest measures” after taking office in favor of a “‘cleansing’ which will have terrible consequences, even for unborn children.”
Cuba has a poor record of respecting unborn children. Although the Castro regime largely sells to the international community the false idea that Cuba has a “world class” healthcare system, the reality is that the country’s healthcare infrastructure is in a barely functional state after more than six decades of disastrous communist policies pushed the nation to the brink of complete ruin.
Evidence collected and published in recent years revealed that the Castro regime manipulates Cuba’s official infant mortality and abortion data, altering the official registries with skewed information such as deliberately redefining dead infants as “dead fetuses” and performing abortions on babies in utero so as to “lower” infant mortality statistics. Similarly, the Castro regime threatens to perform forced abortions on pregnant political prisoners.
“The truth is that, under the political-electoral pretext of a ‘cleansing of illegal people who have invaded the soil that does not belong to them,’ the champions of ‘freedom and human rights’ have found a way out of the crisis they are creating for themselves,” Granma’s report read.
“By transferring thousands of their deportees to that corner of Cuban land that the U.S. has usurped, in its shameless condition as an ‘illegal foreign government that has invaded the soil that does not belong to it,” the report continued.
According to information from the Cuban human rights organization Prisoners Defenders, the communist Castro regime is keeping 1,161 political prisoners hostage as of the end of 2024 — many of whom were unjustly detained after peacefully protesting and calling for an end to communism during the historic July 2021 wave of anti-communism protests. This statistic is probably lower than the true number of prisoners given that the regime goes out of its way to obscure the statistics and often disappears people it considers a threat without any due process.
The regime’s political prisoners, including artists and musicians who have been sentenced to more than 137 years for opposing communism, are routinely subjected to acts of physical and psychological torture and other cruel, degrading treatments that have pushed some of them to commit suicide.
One such case was that of Yosandri Mulet Almarales, a 38-year-old man sentenced in 2022 to ten years in prison on “sedition” charges due to his participation in the July 2021 anti-communism protests. Mulet Almarales died in late August from injuries obtained after he jumped from a bridge before returning from a furlough to a local prison, where he carried out forced labor.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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