Cuba Accuses US Of Killing Fleeing Citizens

Cuba accuses the United States for the death of its citizens who try to flee the island. From Granma:

CUBA condemned Thursday the policies of the United States that incite illegal emigration by residents of the island to that country, with resulting human fatalities, as occurred this past December 22.

According to a communication from the Ministry of the Interior, read out yesterday on the Cuban “Roundtable” TV program, two Cubans perished on Saturday, December 22 after the speedboat in which they were attempting to leave the country capsized one kilometer off the northern coast of Havana province.

…At the same time, the communication concludes, investigations are continuing into this unfortunate accident whose root cause is the murderous U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act, which incites illegal emigration and the lucrative activities of the Cuban American mafia in South Florida.

Naturally, a mouthpiece like Granma, is not going to ask the first question that pops in one’s head when these incidents happen: why are people risking life and limb, including arrest, to flee to the United States, a bastion of capitalist exploitation, from a worker’s paradise like Cuba, where education and healthcare is free, and everybody is happy?

If you read the whole article, human trafficking seems to be the main motivating factor. Cuba is rationalizing that the “Cuban mafia” in Miami is somehow forcing people to flee, for the purposes of slave labor. If human trafficking is indeed the goal, it is half-ass way of going about it. In fact, it’s cheaper to bring people over the Mexican border than it is from Cuba.