Cuban dissidents beg Paris Club NOT to forgive Cuba’s debt

From our Bureau of Gallant Quixotic Gestures

Two hundred Cuban dissidents have asked the Paris Club to make Castro, Inc. pay what it owes. If you only read El Niuyortain and other top news outlets, you are not going to find this piece of news. Instead, you are likely to find reports on how U.S. sanctions are the cause of Cuba’s economic woes.

What do these dissidents know that is being ignored by news agencies? Simple enough: if Castro, inc. defaults on its debt, that repressive crime syndicate will be one step closer to toppling. The dissidents are willing and eager to put up with the deprivations and chaos a default would cause, but they are thinking that it will be short-term pain — much like surgery– after which their country will finally have a chance to unburden itself of its tyrannical oligarchs.

Unfortunately, they are also painfully aware of the fact that the Paris Club will probably ignore their pleas.

received via Email from Asamblea de la Resistencia Cubana:

Leaders of the Cuban Resistance, including 200 opponents who signed from within the Island, announced today at a press conference in the city of Miami that they had sent an open letter to the Paris Club asking that the foreign debt not continue to be extended or restructured. of the Castro state. The Letter was prepared by the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance / Congress of the Cuban Nation, the announcement of the same taking place on the same day that representatives of the Castro regime will appear before the Paris Club to request a further postponement in the payment of the debt contracted by the Regime.

“The debt contracted by the communist regime of Cuba is not sovereign. This is an illegitimate state that has imposed a useless economic model on the Cuban people and that has zero internal and external transparency in the management of public funds. The communist regime is repressive and illegitimate, to finance it is to subsidize the repression in Cuba ”, said Dr. Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, coordinator of the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance.

“The Castro-communist dictatorship incurs multimillion-dollar debts without consulting the Cuban people, the same Cuban citizens are treated as second-rate. Debt facilities and extensions only enrich the dictatorship and strengthen the repressive apparatus. The regime has the resources to buy repressive weapons and equipment, but not to feed the people and build roads and hospitals, ”said former political prisoner Jorge Luis García Antúnez, founder of the National Front for Civic Resistance.

The leaders of the Resistance said that they will go before the Congress of the United States and the parliaments and governments of the member countries of the Paris Club to request that no more financial facilities be extended to the communist regime of Cuba due to its illegitimacy (the debt is not sovereign), its total absence of transparency in public finances and the non-productivity of the economic system imposed on Cubans.
“It is incongruous that credit is extended to a regime that does not pay, and that uses resources to serve itself and increase repression. The Paris Club should not subsidize the repression in Cuba, ”said Sylvia G. Iriondo of the organization MAR for Cuba.

The Paris Club is made up of 14 creditor countries that provide solutions to indebted countries that cannot meet their obligations. Debt treatment may include “restructuring” the debt or reducing the amount owed. The Castro regime renegotiated its debt in 2015. The Paris Club has reduced some $ 8.5 billion from the $ 11.1 billion that the dictatorship owes since 1986. The Castro regime has declared that it cannot meet payments in many occasions, the most recent in 2019 and 2020. The negotiations that begin on June 10 of this year will cover the pending and overdue payments of the Regime, as well as the accumulated penalties. The communist regime in Cuba is expected to request a debt restructuring.