The Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York City held an event on Sunday to celebrate the anniversary of the “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution” (CDRs), local terror cells and spy networks used to infiltrate, intimidate, and subjugate Cubans at the neighborhood level.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez, in town to attend the United Nations General Assembly, celebrated being able to hold such an event in America’s largest city, declaring online, “we ratify the firm commitment of [Revolutionary Diplomacy] to continue defending the Fatherland, the Revolution, and Socialism.”
The United States does not have any analogous government agency to the CDRs, which plant a “representative” on every street block whose job is to spy on his or her neighbors and report all happenings to the Communist Party, particularly if the spy suspects any opposition to communism. Even if it did, such an event celebrating an American government agency in Cuba is unthinkable, as the nation continues to operate as a repressive communist autocracy.
According to Cuban state media, the New York event was used to condemn the United States for its commitment to opposing Cuba’s human rights abuses and repression of its people, as well as the long list of nefarious espionage activities that Cuba has been implicated in throughout the history of Castro family rule.
“The gathering reaffirmed the determination to continue defending Cuba’s right to sovereignly determine its present and future within the multilateral arena,” Cuban state media shared. “Participants denounced the intensification of the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States and its impact on the Cuban population.”
The Cuban U.N. Mission shared more images of the event on the social media site Facebook, celebrating the event as allowing “to share as a collective and recall a history closely tied to the defense of conquests, sovereignty, and the independence of our people.”
The Cuban regime often uses the occasion of the U.N. General Assembly for propaganda purposes in New York. At the event itself, the Cuban delegation – notorious for engaging in uncivilized behavior at international summits to silence political opinions it disagrees with – dramatically walked out during President Donald Trump’s address to the forum, in which he condemned the brutal regime ruling the island and declared the country a failed state. Outside of the United Nations itself, Cuban officials have used access to the U.N. to attend events with sympathetic leftists in the city. In 2018, for example, when figurehead “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel represented Cuba at the General Assembly, Díaz-Canel attended a star-studded event organized by actor Robert De Niro to support the Cuban dictatorship. Reportedly invited to the event were director Darren Aronofsky, Coldplay singer Chris Martin, and late leftist performer Harry Belafonte. Díaz-Canel also reportedly attended an event at a church in Harlem that week to support communist dictatorships in Latin America along with now-deposed Venezuelan tyrant Nicolás Maduro. Journalists attempting to cover that event were assaulted by an alleged Cuban regime “journalist” trying to block legitimate coverage of the meeting.
The event this weekend in New York celebrated one of Fidel Castro’s most gruesome inventions, the CDR local spy network. The system consists of a designated neighborhood “snitch” whose job is to report the comings and goings, private conversations, and daily routines of those living around them. Victims of the local CDR could face torture, arrest, beatings, imprisonment, and “acts of repudiation” – mob shaming rituals – if reported for insufficient loyalty to communism.
On the island, Díaz-Canel celebrated the CDRs with a national message supporting their mission to “defend the fatherland from the neighborhoods.” The CDRs, he claimed, “are where the transformations most connected to the demands of the people become reality,” and the spies “connect national policy to daily lift.”
“Vigilance cannot be abandoned, it must be amplified to save energy, protect the vulnerable, prevent crimes, drugs, and corruption,” he claimed, urging young Cubans to sign up to be local CDR spies.
The current leader of the CDR program, notorious spy Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, published a photo of a cake celebrating the CDRs – an outrageous luxury for most Cubans, who live in a state of abject poverty imposed on them by the regime.
Hernández became internationally known as a member of the “Cuban Five,” a group of spies who infiltrated the Cuban exile community in the United States and used their intelligence to enable the killing of five Americans in the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue incident. Hernández was the only person convicted in the killings, sentenced to two life sentences and 15 years in prison for conspiracy to murder. Leftist President Barack Obama freed Hernández in 2014 after also participating in a convoluted plot to smuggle his sperm out of the United States and artificially inseminate his wife. Hernández received a hero’s welcome in Cuba and was appointed to run the CDR network, responsible for crushing domestic dissent.
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