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The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) submitted a formal request to the main authorities of the European Union to participate in the establishment of an International Compensation Fund for Victims of Crimes Against Humanity by the Cuban Communist Regime, which would be financed with the misappropriated assets belonging to the Cuban people by the Havana regime.
The petition was addressed to the main European authorities, including the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and was accompanied by an institutional report whose central premise is as straightforward as it is compelling: "The property stolen from the Cubans must be used to compensate the Cubans."
Since 1959, the regime has confiscated private property and concentrated state assets in opaque military structures, now grouped in GAESA, the military conglomerate that controls around 40% of the Cuban economy.
The U.S. State Department estimates that the illicit assets of that conglomerate held in offshore accounts amount to up to $20 billion, while the average salary in Cuba does not reach $10 per month, and more than 95% of the population earns less than three dollars a day.
"It is a heritage extracted from the sweat of Cubans," denounced Alejandro González Raga, executive director of the OCDH and former prisoner of conscience of the so-called "Group of 75," detained during the Black Spring of 2003.
The initiative is set against the backdrop of the new international pressure created by the Donald Trump administration: Executive Order 14404, signed on May 1, established a new sanctions framework against Cuba, and on May 7, the Treasury Department designated GAESA and its executive president on the sanctions list, freezing all its assets under U.S. jurisdiction.
On Friday, the deadline set by the Trump administration for foreign companies and foreign financial institutions to cease all operations with GAESA, the Cuban military conglomerate, expired under the threat of being excluded from the U.S. financial system.
"Every dollar frozen at GAESA is a dollar available to compensate the victims," stated the OCDH in its request.
The organization demands four specific actions from the EU:
- Activate without delay the essential human rights clause of the EU-Cuba Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement - Article 85.3.b, which has never been activated since the agreement came into force in 2017.-
- Impose individual sanctions against those responsible for repression
- Coordinate with the United States the tracking and recovery of GAESA assets located in European jurisdictions
- To participate as a founding organization of the fund with an initial contribution and technical assistance.
The OCDH emphasizes that the EU already has all the necessary legal mechanisms: Regulation 2020/1998, the UN Convention against Corruption, the UN Principles of Resolution 60/147, the Trust Fund of the International Criminal Court, and the StAR Initiative of the World Bank.
What is lacking, the organization reports, is political will: since the 2016 Agreement replaced the Common Position of 1996, a decade of "dialogue" has not resulted in a single political prisoner being released in net terms.
This formal demand arrives weeks after activists from OCDH, Cuba Decide, and the Christian Alliance of Cuba presented the "Liberation Agreement" in Brussels to Members of the European Parliament and to the EU Special Representative for Human Rights, Kajsa Ollongren, on May 13.
The OCDH also calls on individuals, organizations, and institutions to sign the adhesion manifesto available at primaveranegra.org.
"Repairing with misappropriated goods is not vengeance: it is restoring the moral order that crime has broken. Europe was conceived as a community of values, not just of interests; the time has come to prove it," concluded González Raga.
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