Cubans Massively Go To War In Ukraine

Media have named the reason.

Cubans are continuing to travel to Russia to join its war on Ukraine despite attempts by the government in Havana to clamp down on recruitment.

This has been reported by Bloomberg.

According to a person familiar with the matter, volunteers are signing up through informal channels and the total number involved in the fighting is likely in the low hundreds, though exact details are hard to establish.

Generous payments offered by the Russian military are luring Cubans to join the war as the Caribbean country struggles with power outages and food shortages amid an economic crisis that has sparked mass migration and street protests. Some Cubans are also attracted to the possibility of obtaining a Russian passport after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree in January allowing foreigners to become Russian citizens in exchange for military service.

“We were the ones who learned and made public that several Cubans in Europe were recruited to fight in the war. We took action against those who also tried to go to war from Cuba,” Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossó told Bloomberg TV and Radio in April.

The Russian Federation and Cuba have had close political ties for decades, dating back to the Soviet Union’s support for Havana against the US trade embargo after the 1959 communist revolution led by Fidel Castro. In March of this year, Russia sent crude oil tankers to Cuba to help mitigate the economic downturn, and last month, a group of naval ships docked in Havana for a planned visit.

At the same time, Bloomberg notes, the number of new recruits to participate in the war is much smaller today compared to the Cold War era, when tens of thousands of Cubans fought in Angola in the 1970s and 1980s along with hundreds of Soviet military advisers in a proxy war against the United States and its allies.

Of course, the number of Cubans visiting Russia, mostly tourists, has dropped sharply in recent years — from almost 77 thousand in 2021 to about 15 thousand last year. However, the number of those who declare that they are there on business has doubled: from 492 in 2021 to 942 last year.

Official Havana sends conflicting signals about the participation of its citizens in the war in Ukraine. Just hours after Cuba’s ambassador to Moscow said in September that his government had no objection to Cubans joining the Russian army, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said Havana’s “unequivocal” position was to oppose such intervention.

After 17 people linked to an alleged human trafficking network luring Cubans to fight on Russia’s side were arrested in September 2023, the Foreign Ministry stressed in a statement that “Cuba is not involved in the war in Ukraine” and would act “resolutely” to stop any recruitment campaigns.

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