Did Cuba send mercenaries to support Russia in Ukraine?

It has been more than two years with this question in the air, and the short answer is that there is no smoking-gun evidence to support a definitive yes. So far, there are signs, clues that may lead us to think yes, but the hypothesis—whether it is more or less plausible is another discussion—that many Cubans who ended up recruited by Moscow were victims of apparently informal networks, whose actors deceived them with false promises of going to work in Russia in sectors such as construction—others departed with the conscious desire to earn money as mercenaries—, is still valid. One of the signs that raises alarm is the number of Cubans who left the country to land in the bloody conflict. What many rationally ask themselves is whether that movement should not have raised suspicions among the authorities, although there is the fact that Cubans enjoy a visa free regime when traveling to Russia.

You can imagine that the most immediate and extended answer is yes, because the nature of the Cuban government is "unhealthy", "deceitful", "subreptitious", and therefore it is most likely that Havana has been involved in some secret scheme to support Russia, an old ally. Thus, the latest note on this topic has just been published by Axios, and it allows me to update and re-problematize the discussion. According to the piece of information by journalist Hans Nichols,Foggy Bottom has recently informed selected members of Congress that "Cuba has contributed up to 5,000 fighters for Russia's war in Ukraine."

But when we read what the office headed by Marco Rubio actually has in hand, the many shortcomings emerge. "Estimates vary, but most open-source information suggests between 1,000 and 5,000 Cuban citizens are fighting in Ukraine at any given time," reads the Axios article. In other words, part of the data comes from open sources, not hard intelligence. The distance between 1,000 and 5,000 speaks to an extraordinary lack of coherence, don´t you think? This greatly resembles those influencers, politicians, and other shoddy actors in the Cuban debate who are only interested in vilifying the Cuban government and inflaming and eroding public debate. On that path, if they are talking about "the murderous dictatorship," they can just as easily say it has killed hundreds as thousands. It depends on the moment and the immediate "revelation".

And there is a little more along this line. Axios stresses that "Ukrainian intelligence sources estimate several thousand are deployed directly to the Ukrainian front." It is the same story, because how much indeterminacy is there when talking about "several thousand"? I can just as easily speak of 3,000 as of 7,000, and nothing happens. In practice, what is happening and will continue to happen—due to the worrying weakness of people's cognitive frameworks for informing themselves with a critical sense—is that little by little it will be forgotten that there are nothing more than "signs" in this story, signs that may even be very good, but no concrete evidence. And many, therefore, will (continue to) present the narrative as proven fact. So "slander, slander, something always sticks."

Source for the image in the cover.