A Cuban teenager unwittingly found himself on the front lines of the war in Ukraine after accepting a job offer he received on WhatsApp to do "construction work" for the Russian military, according to Time magazine.
Alex Vegas Díaz, 19, and a friend were taken to a military base, outfitted with weapons, and then sent to fight, according to Time, which reviewed social media footage posted by Vegas Díaz.
In one of the videos, dated August 31, which went viral, Vegas Díaz can be seen in a Russian hospital recovering from an unspecified illness. According to Time, he said he was due to be sent back to the front upon recovery.
From his hospital bed, he pleaded to "help get us out of here," adding: "What is happening in Ukraine is ugly—to see people with their heads open before you, to see how people are killed, feel the bombs falling next to you."
According to Time, Vegas Díaz said in one video: "There are dead Cubans, there are missing Cubans, and this is not going to end until the war is over."
He added: "We know that Cuba is aware and our advice to Cubans is not to come here. This is the craziest thing. Crazy. Don't do it."
Time reported that Vegas Díaz became part of a large operation that openly recruited hundreds of Cubans to join the Russian army to fight in Ukraine.
According to the magazine, the recruitment effort involved adverts for job contracts with the Ministry of Defence in Russia that began to appear on Cuban Facebook groups in June.
It said that recruits were offered 204,000 rubles, or $2,120 US dollars, to sign up.
Average monthly salaries in Cuba are dramatically lower, making it an enticing prospect.
Time reviewed the job contracts, which it said required a one-year commitment, but came with an enlistment fee and a payout for the families of recruits if they are killed in action.
The exact number of Cubans recruited through this initiative remains uncertain, with estimates provided to Time ranging from hundreds to more than a thousand
Though Cuba's foreign ministry described the recruitment effort as a "human trafficking network," four Cuba experts and former US officials expressed skepticism to Time
They said that the Cuban government, a long-standing ally of Russia, may be using such language to maintain the appearance of a neutral stance in the Ukraine conflict, Time reported.
Regardless of the nature or provenance of the recruitment drive, there is concern in the US that recruits such as Vegas Díaz may have been deceived into accepting job offers.
The State Department said in a statement provided to Time that "we are deeply concerned that young Cubans may have been deceived and recruited to fight for Russia in its brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and we continue to monitor this situation closely."
The US State Department did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
lol no
Fr, bush did to Iraq, with bombs and white phosphorous, what liberals think Putin is doing to Ukraine right now
yeah call me when Putin sets up a torture site and starts indiscriminately bombing civilian infrastructure. civilian deaths in Iraq/Afghanistan are orders of magnitude higher than in Ukraine.
Ring ring.
Torture: ✅
Indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets: ✅
Both have been going on for a while.
But I suppose you'll just plug your ears and close your eyes and tell me this is ProPaGanDa or some shit?
Oh and Bush is a fucking bastard, don't get me wrong. But so is Putin.
Even this is sadly disingenuous, as it was official US policy to destroy infrastructure. In a desert, that will kill a lot of people. That 300,000 really is closer to 1,000,000 if you include people that died from the lack of power and water.
So in other words it is happening in Ukraine despite the suggestion to the contrary by the person to whom I was responding.
Civilian deaths and torture are abhorrent no matter what country perpetrates them and no matter for what claimed reason they do so.
The point they were making, and I'm going to quote their post, and edit it so it is more clear, is this:
Percentage of Civilian deaths to pre-war population: ~0.00025
Percentage of Civilian deaths to pre-war population: ~0.012
I don't actually agree with those numbers that they are using, but I think they were trying to imply that there is a difference in the percentage. Which is to say the Iraq percentage is 48 times larger that the Ukrainian percentage.
The OP can correct me if I misspoke, or put words in their mouth.
The larger point here being not some whataboutism, but a counter-claim to Russia doing any such thing systematically. The deaths of civilians is always wrong but inevitable in war, but any claim that it's any more systematic in this war than in others needs to be able to reckon with this huge difference in scale. I don't believe the original person claiming this about Russia can achieve that
Now that is a clear claim and worth chewing on. Why ghost didn't say that idk. Appreciate you bringing up this point.
Hey you know youre actually sposed to show us the counterargument in your epic thread-killing retort, right?
hello! do you have a source for these claims, by chance? I would like to do some reading.
Torture
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-prisons-civilians-torture-detainees-88b4abf2efbf383272eed9378be13c72
UN report - https://apnews.com/article/un-human-rights-torture-civilians-russia-ukraine-29e238cf0ec6a2e6a25bfd260bf5e93b
Another source for UN report - https://theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/27/un-russian-forces-tortured-executed-civilians-ukraine
Torture used by Russian forces in Ukraine may be state policy: UN https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/16/torture-used-by-russian-forces-in-ukraine-may-be-state-policy-un
Civilian targets
Putin targets Ukrainian civilians because he could in Syria https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/19/putin-targets-ukrainian-civilians-because-he-could-in-syria
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66781487
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/01/terror-bombing-why-is-russia-targeting-civilians-in-ukraine
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/19/ukraine-russian-missile-strike-lviv-possible-war-crime
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna63436
Russia-Ukraine updates: Drone attack ‘aimed at civilian sites’ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/5/30/russia-ukraine-live-news-moscow-hit-by-rare-drone-attack
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/08/russia-attacks-ukraine-infrastructure-putin/
‘Senseless barbarism’: Russian missiles target Ukraine’s cities https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/29/russian-missile-barrage-targets-cities-across-ukraine
https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/03/russia-bombing-civilian-targets-crimes-ukraine-victoria-amelina
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/10/ukraine-russian-attacks-on-critical-energy-infrastructure-amount-to-war-crimes/
Thank you! I'll take a look through these when I get a chance away from work, I appreciate it!
No prob!
Have you even been following the war at all?! ive seen 4k videos of Russia bombing Ukrainian Civilians for months now, not Civilian Infrastructure,just straight up targeting Civilians. Im not trying to discount the hundreds of thousands of Civilians the United States has killed in the middle east, but if the war in Ukraine continues for as long as the war in Afghanistan did, it will easily be in the millions due to famine and starvation, because countless countries are already on the cusp of Famine from the war in Ukrainian wheat from reaching the middle east.
Millions. Iraq alone is estimated at around 1,000,000. Never mind how many people the weapons we ended up giving to ISIS under the program Operation Timber Sycamore killed. Or the amount of people that died in Yemen due to our support of a blockade, or the children in Iraq that starved to death due to our sanctions after the first war.
Stop downplaying the horror of what the US did in the middle east. You don't need to do that to criticize Russia.
Russia has been extremely restrained in destroying Ukrainian infrastructure, especially in the first year of the war. It has also made strong efforts to avoid civilian casualties. Considering it wants to incorporate the zones where there is the greatest conflict into being part of the Russian Federation, it's not like this is surprising either. I'm sure this sounds shocking or ludicrous to someone who has been closely following along, and I do take your word for it that you have. But there is a very good reason for that. To explain:
I have also been following the war extremely closely since the beginning, including from countless telegram channels of people on the ground on both sides in addition to official outlets and what I've seen is a massive amount of ridiculous false propaganda spewing out of Ukraine's official outlets that the west eats up and repeats without question, often amplifying the false parts and making up even more. It is to the benefit of both the current Ukrainian rulers and the west to make this propaganda, so I'm not saying Ukraine is doing this to the west, I'm saying they're both complicit. Yes, I've seen plenty of propaganda from Russia too, obviously, but it is nowhere near the same scale or level of outright lying about what's actually happening on the ground, not because Russia is somehow above all that (it's definitely not) but because it has far less need for such false propaganda. (It is also arguably not as good at propaganda as the West which has the most developed propaganda apparatus in the history of humanity).
There is material reasons behind all of this. Ukraine relies almost entirely on NATO countries for its ability to wage war, this is not in question. It therefore needs to sell that war as not only just, but winnable - and whatever you you think of how just it is, it is definitely not winnable in terms of taking back the currently occupied regions let alone Crimea. That will simply never happen. NATO also has a vested interest in Ukraine winning this war, and in many ways is NATO's proxy war, so it also has an interest in pushing this propaganda on the people of its member nations. However, Russia has ramped up production of its war machine (and is highly self sufficient despite what some western propaganda might say about them having to fight with shovels lol) and importantly is not dependent on other countries to wage this war. It doesn't need to sell this war internationally and It doesn't even need to sell this war to the Russian populace who already broadly support it. Hence the large difference in amount and severity of false propaganda. If you have been following the war closely, but you have been relying entirely or mostly on Ukrainian, Western, and NATO information (which is understandable because it's really all you get offered in the west), you have been closely following a massively lopsided story being told to you by someone who isn't just distorting fact, but outright lying.
Since you specifically mentioned bombing of infrastructure, here is one example I just happened on in a different thread today. It's from the New York Times, which has been one of the cringiest large network liars throughout the conflict, but even here they are making an admission that what was claimed to be Russian attack was actually Ukraine itself. This happens all the time but usually admissions aren't made or are done very quietly so everyone believes the first story of "look at how horrible Russia is!" My suspicion is that admissions like these are starting to happen more often because there is beginning to be a shift in the narrative and propaganda as it becomes increasingly clear how unwinnable this is for Ukraine and NATO is beginning to look to pull support.
There are tons of other examples of this, but I don't currently have access to the laptop I saved all my sources on. Anyway, the reality is that you are being lied to constantly about the crimes Russia is supposedly committing, at the very least, the severity of them. And it's helpful to understand why.
I know I'll get called a Russian bot/shill for pointing these things out. Whatever. I have no love for Russia. Fuck Putin and the reactionary Russian government. But I really do despise the intensity of misinformation I've been witnessing and how it gets repeated by genuinely well-meaning people around me (I'm in the west too) who only have access to lies that are perpetuating death and human misery.
I bought chapo gold for this post.
You are, actively, in this post. Undeniable facts.
Or call me when Russians start kidnapping children like the Americans did in..oh wait that's unique to Russia
How about when America stops using rape as a tactic in war..oh shit they did that a century ago but we are STILL WAITING FIR RUSSIA TO ABANDON RAPE AS A WAR TACTIC.
Both invasions were wrong and each side had unique crimes BUT Russia is committing these crimes against humanity right now.
We set up a pipeline for kidnapping Cuban children: Operation Peter Pan (Because, of course it was named that)
Not saying anything about the Russian/Ukrainian war but you are literally pretending that America didn't do these things.
Also, America absolutely raped a bunch of people in Iraq/Afghanistan, and outsourced child rape to the Northern Alliance (Warlords that we absolutely set up during the USSR/Afghanistan war). We, in fact, ordered soldiers to not interfere with the child rape, while they guarded the people doing the raping.
Let me fix that for you: Both invasions were wrong and have committed these crimes within the last 5 years.
You want to criticize these things? I'm right there with you. The second you only criticize enemies of the US State Department, then you've become nothing more than a nationalist propagandist.
Edit: Diction changes
Cw: pedophilia, rape
If you plug your ears and say "lalala" you can ignore the mass kidnapping of vietnamese and cuban children. As well as refugee children that is still ongoing and is connected to pedophile rings.
They literally are still raping US female soldiers at ridiculous rates. What do you think they do to women they've been trained to dehumanize?
folks, this is the nerd who claims fascist states are freer than socialist states
Remember when Russia used their intelligence agency to kidnap 14,000 Cuban children and traffic them through catholic church adoption agencies?
Ah whoops, that was America doing operation Peter Pan in 1960. Of course Wikipedia frames it as totally a rescue and not CIA human trafficking bro, but of course there were loads of settled-out-of-court lawsuits for CSA by church officials and staff. The good guys, everyone!
What the actual fuck is wrong with you. The US has had policies of child kidnapping in every single war zone it's been in for the last 50 years.
The evidence for this being a tactic that the Russians are using is that there is a lot of rape happening and that the Russian state does nothing to stop it. A measure by which of course the US has still not stopped either.
The US participated in a giant network of child trafficking for the purpose of child rape for decades in Afghanistan.