It’s all coming together in a beautiful communist circle, I guess. Living in Cuba sucks, Russia sucks, and fighting for Russia in Ukraine sucks awful, but living in Cuba sucks worse than the thought of fighting for Russia in Ukraine, so…si, señor hell, да!

Cuban authorities have arrested 17 people on charges related to the ring of human traffickers that allegedly lures young Cuban men to serve in the Russian military. The charges range from human trafficking to fighting as a mercenary and hostile action against a foreign state. The… pic.twitter.com/FiiCh5I1yW

— Гюндуз Мамедов/Gyunduz Mamedov (@MamedovGyunduz) September 9, 2023

I’ll sign on the dotted line. Now gimme a ticket outta this dump.

Cuban authorities said they had arrested 17 people on charges related to a ring of human traffickers that allegedly lured young Cuban men to serve in the Russian military amid the Ukraine conflict.

Cuba earlier this week revealed authorities were working to “neutralize and dismantle” the network, which it said operated both on Cuban soil and in Russia.

“As a result of the investigations, 17 people have been arrested so far, among them the internal organizer of these activities,” Cesar Rodriguez, a colonel with Cuba´s interior ministry, said late on Thursday on a TV program.

Rodriguez did not name any of those accused of participating in the ring, but said the group´s leader relied on two people residing on the island to recruit Cubans to fight for hire on behalf of Russia in Ukraine.

I love how the Cubans call what are basically Russian recruiting officers “human traffickers.” Maybe if the Castros weren’t running such a miserable excuse for an island paradise, their young men wouldn’t find running off to a foreign war thousands of miles away so attractive?

I’m just stabbing in the dark here.

According to the CNN report, the Russian recruiters looked for Cubans who had a “criminal history,” although in Cuba, couldn’t that be almost anyone for anything?

It seems the cover was blown off Russia’s recruitment efforts by a hacked email to a Tula military commander that contained nuggets detailing the Cuban participation.

…The network of mercenaries became known from a leak by hackers who hacked the email of the Tula military commissar Anton Perevozchikov. In the received letters, hackers found information about 198 Cuban citizens and one Colombian. In July and August, they arrived in Moscow in groups of 10-30 people and went to Tula to fill out documents and then be sent to the front.

Straight to the front? That would also tend to support the narrative that Russia’s not in the greatest shape if their mercenaries are getting zero to minimal training and zipped off right away.

YOICKS

The phrase “cannon fodder” ring a bell? I’m sure these guys signed up thinking they’d spend a couple months shining brass and then move to someplace nice-that-wasn’t-Cuba afterward.

Or schmaybe – just schmaybe – these “recruiters/traffickers” were doing what recruiters have done since time immemorial. Using women for bait, picking the dumbest of the lot, and lying their asterisks off.

The Miami Herald is saying the “ring” pitched Russian “construction jobs” to the lads, who were then snatched up as they hit the Mother Country. Classic trafficking moves, too – passports taken, the whole deal. Well, classic Russian moves, too, for that matter. The young guys the Herald talked about were thoroughly disenchanted with their adventures abroad.

…The announcement came after two 19-year-old Cubans, identified as Andorf Antonio Velázquez García, from Havana, and Alex Rolando Vega Díaz, from Santa Clara, told a Cuban influencer last week that, desperate to leave the island, they had been scammed and lured to Russia under false pretenses, ending up sleeping in a trench in Ukraine along Russian forces.

They said that “friends” in Cuba provided them with the contact of a Cuban woman who offered them a contract to do construction work in Russia. Members of the ring, which included at least two other Russian women, they said, sent them a contract in Russian they were told not to translate and bought them a ticket to fly from Varadero to Moscow. Cubans do not need a visa to travel to Russia.

“I couldn’t stand it in Cuba, that’s why I was dying to leave; I had to help my family some way,” Velázquez García told Alain Lambert Sánchez, known in social media as Alain Paparazzi Cubano, a Cuban influencer who now lives in Miami.

The young men told Lambert that once in Russia, a Russian woman seized their passports, and they took a citizenship test they thought was used to get fake Russian documents on their behalf. They never got the money promised. Instead, they ended up in a unit in Ryazan, a city in Central Russia, where they passed military training. They were later sent to a place in Ukraine they could not locate but described as a forest 60 miles from the front lines When they got sick, they were taken to several hospitals and later returned to the Ryazan unit.

I know they were desperate to leave the island, but hello, dummies.

Note to young people: As SOON as you are told by someone – especially a stranger offering you something – “DO NOT TRANSLATE THIS,” make damn sure the first thing you do is TRANSLATE THAT. It will most oftentimes save you sleeping in a trench in Ukraine.

Cuba is threatening up to the death penalty for the traffickers it’s arrested, and is sticking to an adamant version of, “Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!”

…Cuba says it has no part in the war in Ukraine, and that it rejects the use of its citizens as mercenaries.

Which is in itself ironic, as Cuban mercenaries used to be all the rage.

Times change.