Interviews with Carlos Alberto Montaner

International organizations like the UN essentially end up being an instrument used by the Cuban government. Cuban diplomacy is very skilled. They know very well how these international organizations work. They have very capable professionals that are experts at manipulation. Due to this influence, most of the time the UN as a whole, and its sub-agencies such as UNESCO and to a lesser extent UNICEF, end up being instruments of the Cuban government. A classic example is the UN’s Human Rights Commission that meets in Geneva. If there’s one thing that is obvious, it’s that Cuba violates human rights, violates them blatantly.

However, due to its composition that existed for so long, it was very difficult for the Human Rights Commission to condemn the Cuban dictatorship, even for its such evident human rights violations. For a while the United States, especially when Ambassador Armando Valladares headed the delegation, the Commission condemned the Cuban dictatorship. Once the US stopped bringing up those motions of censorship, the Czech Republic took charge of those motions, but all the while the Cuban government maneuvered though the system until it was able to control the Commission again. When the Commission dissolved and broke up into different segments, Libya presided over the Commission and Cuba was very important.

So dictatorships used this Commission to protect each other. There’s a lot of hypocrisy and cynicism in these institutions. Every year the UNDP publishes the Human Development Index, a report that is widely referenced. The capacity of the Cuban government to manipulate the information for the report to reflect what they want it to reflect is incredible, to such an extent that the information was so falsified that the UNDP decided not to include it in the report. The Cuban government protested, so the information will be included in the next edition, all the information that makes the Cuban government look good.

Similar things happen in UNESCO. Meaning, Cuban diplomacy, which is very skilled at manipulation, will use all those organizations to its benefit. There are others that aren’t so easy to manipulate because Cuba is no longer part of them, like the World Bank for example. Cuba is not a part of the international finance system because it chose to separate in the 60s from the World Bank. But wherever Cuban diplomacy can act we can be sure they’ll dedicate a lot of time, work, and effort to having well-trained diplomats pursuing their interests, which will consist essentially of disfiguring the truth. It’s a government and political system dedicated to hiding the truth, and they do that very well.

Carlos Alberto Montaner is an exiled Cuban author and journalist. He was born in Havana in 1943. Soon after the revolution of 1959, he was imprisoned by the Castro regime on charges of participating in terrorist attacks and working with the CIA. Montaner, who was 16 years old at the time, emphatically denied the charges. He later escaped from prison and from Cuba.

In the 1960s, Montaner began writing a weekly column that was soon appearing in almost every Latin American country. In 1970, he moved to Madrid and began writing works of fiction and nonfiction. In 1972 he established a publishing house, Editorial Playor. His most widely acclaimed books include “Informe Secreto Sobre la Revolución Cubana,” published in 1975; “200 Años de Gringos,” published in 1976 on the occasion of the bicentennial of the United States and analyzing the reasons the United States has developed differently than Latin American countries; and “Fidel Castro y la Revolución Cubana” (1984).

It has been estimated that 6 million people now read his weekly columns, and he has lectured frequently throughout the hemisphere about the defense of liberty, economic development, and the important role of culture in the evolution of societies. He is also a regular commentator on CNN’s Spanish-language broadcasts.