SENATORS’ STATEMENTS — Situation in Cuba

Honourable senators, there is a tragedy unfolding a few hours’ flight from our borders. It is a crisis that is as much a humanitarian catastrophe as it is a damning indictment of a failed, brutal ideology. The situation in Cuba has collapsed. It has deteriorated to levels never seen before.

While the regime in Havana points its fingers everywhere but at itself, let us be clear: The primary inflictor of suffering on the Cuban people is the Cuban regime. For 67 years, democracy has been buried. In its place is a machine of repression. It jails citizens for the crime of demanding bread. It crushes dissent to protect a corrupt elite.

While ordinary Cubans stand in mile-long lines for a handful of rice, the generals and party bureaucrats grow wealthy off the very shortages they created. They have turned a once-vibrant nation into a prison. They sustain it through a dark web of alliances with Russia, China and Venezuela, powers that view the Cuban people as nothing more than a strategic soft underbelly for geopolitical games.

Honourable senators, we must look in the mirror as Canadians. We may want to talk about this now due to anti-American sentiment, but where have these voices been for the past 67 years? Our hearts shouldn’t bleed for the Cuban people only when it is politically convenient. Every winter, thousands of Canadians flock to what are undoubtedly the most beautiful beaches in the world. At what cost, honourable senators?

We must call out the travel operators who bury their heads in the sand for profit. They sell a dream while ignoring a nightmare. While Canadians sip cocktails in guarded enclaves, the waiter serving them cannot find milk for his children. Those vacation dollars do not reach the Cuban people. They flow directly into the regime’s pockets, the military conglomerate that funds the very boots on the necks of dissidents.

We have heard the warnings. Many brave Cubans who fled that repression have walked the halls of this very Parliament. They come here to caution us, to educate us and to testify that the regime’s reach does not end at the Straits of Florida. They are first-hand witnesses to a repression that shadows them even here on Canadian soil. It might be impossible to reason with a regime that views its own people as enemies of the state, but we can hope that those of us in this chamber and beyond, empowered to use our voices, are brave enough to stand on the right side of history.

It is time for the Canadian government and our businesses to stop propping up this brutal regime. Let’s stop business as usual and start backing the Cuban people directly through civil society and their own emerging private sector, not just now when it suits political expediency as anti-Americanism is being wielded as a shield. We need to restore promise and hope for the Cuban people through our democratic values and free enterprise.

If I happened to encounter the Cuban Ambassador, I would plead for him to take a simple message back to his regime: The people of Cuba deserve the freedom and dignity they have been denied for far too long. The world is watching, and the time for silence and acquiescence is over.

Thank you, colleagues.