Eduardo Vasco
Bankers and magnates of the American and European bourgeoisie fund NGOs to produce narratives; then UN officials grant legitimacy to those narratives, which are subsequently amplified by dominant media outlets.
Escreva para nós: infostrategic-culture.su
There is a vast historical record demonstrating the modus operandi of imperialism-especially U.S. imperialism-when it needs to resort to direct action to overthrow an inconvenient government and replace it with a puppet willing to hand over a given country's natural resources and economy to the plunder of major international monopolies.
Military invasion, or a coup d'état, cannot take place without prior preparation in the eyes of both domestic and international public opinion. The government to be overthrown must be portrayed as evil, a violator of human rights, a sponsor of terrorism, or a threat to international security. To accomplish this, imperialism relies on its propaganda industry-but someone must provide the material that serves as the basis for such propaganda.
This is when the "experts" and international bodies come into play, whether NGOs or even the United Nations itself. They issue reports and statements condemning the government in question, allegations that are quickly and massively distributed by the propaganda industry of imperialism, repeated a thousand times, and echoed by new "experts" and organizations equally controlled by the United States and its network of allies.
In March, a letter addressed to the Cuban government was published, signed by four United Nations rapporteurs, alleging that it violates human rights by holding political prisoners without due process of law. These would be the individuals imprisoned for the attempted color revolution of July 2021, described by the imperialist propaganda apparatus as "democratic protests."
In the document, dated January 7, they refer to "a systematic pattern of criminalization of dissent and the use of coercion, including arbitrary detention and forced exile, against human rights defenders, activists, and artists in Cuba." They state that they received this information, but do not mention from whom. We will see shortly who stands behind these accusations.
But first, who are these rapporteurs ? One of them is the Colombian Gina Romero, Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association. Academically, she holds a master's degree from the Sorbonne and was a visiting professor at Columbia University. For Latin Americans, studying and teaching at universities in France and the United States are marks of prestige. But for France and the U.S., hosting foreign students and professors in their universities is a way of producing intellectuals aligned with their objectives, who may later return to their own countries and assume governmental or corporate positions from which they can lobby in favor of imperialism.
The ideology of imperialism over recent decades-from the struggle against "communism" during the Cold War to the fight against "Islamic terrorism"-has been the defense of a supposed democracy opposed to communist and Islamic authoritarianism. And entities within the United Nations and multilateral institutions dominated by Western powers have adopted this as their flagship principle.
It is no coincidence that Ms. Romero, as stated in her UN biographical summary, had led "various initiatives for the promotion and defense of democracy and the rule of law" before being appointed to her current position in 2024. She founded and served for nearly ten years as executive director of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy (Redlad), which for years received funding from the U.S. State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a U.S. government-funded institution.
As executive director of Redlad, Romero also worked in the Secretariat of the Civil Society Pillar within the Community of Democracies, an intergovernmental entity founded at the height of U.S. global dominance by Madeleine Albright, then U.S. Secretary of State, and structured as an alliance of Western governments and their proxies to confront the "enemies of democracy"-that is, those who do not submit to imperial dictates. She also served on the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy, launched in 1999 by the NED, which functions as its secretariat.
The other rapporteur signing the anti-Cuban letter is Irene Khan, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. She served as Secretary General of Amnesty International from 2001 to 2009. Amnesty International is one of the largest imperialist non-governmental organizations internationally and, as such, although it defines itself as an NGO, receives funding from European governments and George Soros's Open Society Foundations, for example.
Between 2012 and 2019, Ms. Khan headed the International Development Law Organization, another entity funded by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and other allies, as well as foundations such as the British Council, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. She also sits on the board of trustees of the Overseas Development Institute, based in London and supported by funding from the European Commission, European governments, USAID, and others. Like her colleagues, Khan teaches at several elite Western academic institutions and has also served as an adviser to the World Bank.
Mary Lawlor, Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders and another of those responsible for the anti-Cuban letter, also worked for Amnesty International. For 12 years, she served as director of the Irish section of the organization, whose board she had already joined in 1975 and which she chaired from 1983 to 1987.
In 2001, she founded the organization for the protection of human rights defenders, Front Line Defenders, of which she served as executive director for 15 years. This entity is funded by the European Commission, European and Western governments, as well as the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, among others.
The fourth signatory is the Greek Alexandra Xanthaki. Having moved to the United Kingdom around 30 years ago, she earned a master's degree in "Human Rights and Emergency Rights" from Queen's University Belfast, a doctorate from Keele University in England, is a member of the Oxford Summer School in Human Rights, and a law professor at Brunel University London, where she directs a project funded by the European Union.
As UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, she joined the longstanding defamation campaign regarding the repression of ethnic minorities in Tibet and was criticized by the Chinese government. Curiously, she defended the right of Russian military personnel to participate in the Olympic Games, provided they had not committed "atrocities, crimes against humanity, genocide," or spread "war propaganda" during the conflict in Ukraine.
However, in statements to The New York Times, she claimed that the Russian special operation represents "a gradual destruction of all cultural life" in Ukraine, seemingly unconcerned with the suppression of Russian culture-significant in the Donbass region-during the previous eight years before the "invasion," as the coup-installed regime in Kyiv had already imposed discriminatory laws against ethnic Russians since 2014.
The four signatories rely on information provided by someone, yet they do not mention whom. However, an organization called Prisoners Defenders claims credit for having supplied the information to the rapporteurs. It is an NGO based in Madrid and founded by Cuban-Spanish businessman Javier Larrondo, whose brief biographical summary on the organization's own website admits that he has "extensive experience" in conspiracies against the Cuban government promoted "both philanthropically and with grant funding." But who pays them?
The NGO also acknowledges on its website that it receives funding from a "transition promotion" program (in this case, toward capitalism) run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.
Larrondo also worked alongside counterrevolutionary figure Oswaldo Payá and helped found the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), which seeks to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and return the country to the status of a U.S. semi-colony. According to reports, he has ties to the former Spanish branch of the Cuban American National Foundation, an entity funded by the CIA to promote terrorist activities against Cuba, as well as to the Cuban mafia in Miami.
Although Prisoners Defenders claims to work "for human rights and pro-democracy advocacy," its activities are directed almost entirely against Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Belarus, Iran, Vietnam, Syria (at least until Assad's fall), Turkey, Pakistan, and Bahrain-nearly all governments considered inconvenient to the United States.
However, there is not a single line regarding the defense of human rights in Spain, where the NGO is based. On the contrary, Prisoners Defenders lobbies in the Spanish parliament and the European Parliament, especially among members of the PP and even VOX, the Spanish far right. The NGO also boasts of being recognized by the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Congress, and other entities within the same imperial network to which belong the UN rapporteurs who feed its anti-Cuban propaganda.
This case illustrates how the imperial campaign surrounding human rights functions: bankers and magnates of the American and European bourgeoisie fund NGOs to produce narratives; then UN officials-who are likewise on their payroll-grant legitimacy to those narratives, which are subsequently amplified by dominant media outlets such as Infobae and El País, in this case.
All of them share the same origins of funding, training, and institutional support; all of them belong to the same network of U.S. global dominance and Western imperialism aimed at subjugating the peoples of smaller nations.