The deep CIA-front ties of Cuban ‘opposition leader’ targeting Canada-Cuba relations
Written by: Aidan Jonah
The visit of an anti-communist Cuban ‘opposition leader’ to Ottawa went under the radar of many. It signals a further escalation of action by Canadian conservatives both in Canada’s Parliament and Senate.
Assembly of the Cuban Resistance (ARC) leader, Dr. Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat, visited Ottawa in the second last week of June, where he spoke with both Parliamentarians and a Senator. According to an ARC press release sent to The Canada Files, this is the second time Gutiérrez-Boronat met with Canadian parliamentarians and senators.
The ARC campaign to damage Canada’s relations with Cuba and Cuba’s reputation in Canada, began on June 14, 2022 and netted Gutiérrez-Boronat op-eds in the Toronto Star and Hill Times, mainly focused on encouraging Canadians to stop tourism to Cuba, under the guise that it supports a ‘brutal communist regime’. On June 16, 2022, the ARC and the Cuba Justice Committee went to Parliament Hill, and met Liberal MP Navdeep Bains.
Luis Zúñiga, an ARC member, is an important name. Zúñiga is a convicted terrorist who was allowed to enter Canada in June 2022, despite the protests of the Canadian Network on Cuba.
Gutiérrez-Boronat, a proud anti-communist, is also National Secretary of the Cuban Democratic Directorate (Directorio), which took $650k USD from the CIA-front National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 2021 alone. CDD took $3.2 million USD from the NED between just 2016 and 2020.
In 2020, Telesur reported that “the USAID and the State Department have given the organization [CDD] at least $6,970,939 from 2006 to 2019,” this being backed up by an NED annual report showing funding back in 2011.
A CDD annual report for 2019 lays out how reliant they are on US government funding. 90 per cent of its funding comes from these sources:
· “61.5% of its support for the year ended December 31, 2019 from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding passed through from the U.S. Department of State directly (DOS)”
· “10.6% from the International Republican Institute (IRI) and 17.9% from Grupo de Apoyo a la Democracia (GAD), which are both funded through the USAID.”
When The Canada Files reached out to Gutiérrez-Boronat’s PR team, to ask if his position with the Cuban Democratic Directorate was a paid or volunteer one, they refused to answer this question. ProPublica data reveals that Gutiérrez-Boronat has drawn either a full or part-time salary from 2001 onwards. Between 2001 to 2010, Gutiérrez-Boronat earned more than $40k USD for all years except 2008 and 2010. Between 2011 to 2014, Gutiérrez-Boronat’s earnings dipped to between $4k to $26k USD per year. From 2015 onwards, he’s earned a minimum of $60k USD per year.
While Navdeep Bains was the only MP to meet with the ARC delegation in 2022, this would change in 2023.
A number of Conservative MPs and a Conservative Senator met with the ARC delegation, specifically: “Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman, Shadow Minister for Finance Jasraj Singh Hallan, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Hon. Michael Chong, Shadow Minister for International Development Garnett Genuis, Shadow Minister for National Defence James Bezan, Shadow Minister for Treasury Board Stephanie Kusie, and Canadian Senator for Quebec Leo Housakos.”
Gutiérrez-Boronat would get op-eds published around his 2023 trip, in the Hamilton Spectator, Western Standard and Hill Times. This year, he focused on pressuring Canada to stop providing taxpayer dollars to the Club of Paris, which provides millions in loans each year to the Cuban government.
Gutiérrez-Boronat’s PR team refused to answer The Canada Files’ question about how the 2022 and 2023 trips to Ottawa were funded.
Housakos, a Conservative Senator, is an unsurprising guest given his past diatribes against Cuba. Housakos gave a speech on March 24, 2022, written by rabidly pro-US Democratic Spaces director Michael Lima, calling for diplomatic recognition to be shifted to Cuban dissidents, away from Cuban government. Housakos would speak at a Macdonald-Laurier Institute (which takes money from the anti-communist Latvian, Taiwan province and US governments) event on November 15, 2022 which called for sanctions on Cuban officials and a change of Canadian foreign policy towards Cuba.
NED and Canadian policy making
This isn’t the first time the CIA-front NED has sought to interfere in Canadian policy making, whether through an organization or an employee of an organization they support. The NED-funded Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project (URAP) was critical in getting a unanimous vote in Canadian parliament, bar abstentions, to support a resolution falsely claiming China was committing genocide against Uygur Muslims in its Xinjiang province. In early 2023, the NED-funded Tibet Action Institute succeeded in pressuring Canada’s parliament into creating a study into a false claim they initiated, that boarding schools in China’s Tibet province are very similar to Canadian residential schools.
Now, after pressuring the Canadian government to act on false narratives of slave labour in Xinjiang province via public releases and joining in on a 2021 lawsuit, URAP is celebrating the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE)’s move to investigate Nike and Dynasty Gold around alleged usage of slave labour. URAP was one of the 28 Canadian NGOs which filed a complaint to CORE in June 2022, seeking to have Nike and Dynasty Gold investigated, which produced the recent CORE investigation decision.
URAP itself, alongside “CSRDN on behalf of Broad Coalition” had filed a separate complaint to CORE in April 2021, seeking an investigation into Canadian companies which employed people in Xinjiang around supposed slave labour, which was accepted in August 2022. An investigation based on this complaint is now ongoing.
On July 19, URAP Executive Director Mehmet Tohti, deeply tied to the CIA-front NED since 2004, joined a Washington meeting of US Congress members and Canadian Members of Parliament, focused on supposed slave labour in Xinjiang and actions to take around it.
The National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA-front, continues to gain more influence in Canadian policy making, as the Canadian government has very openly become a US servant, foreign policy being no exception.
Canadian policy towards Cuba, already having seen a rhetorical shift in PM Trudeau’s rhetoric towards the island nation (now Cuba is a ‘regime’), seems set for a drift towards US-level hostility, if NED-connected forces continue getting their way.
Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
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Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah has broken numerous stories, including how the Canadian Armed Forces trained neo-Nazi "journalist" Roman Protasevich while he was with the Azov Battalion, and how a CIA front group (the NED) funded the group (URAP) which drove the "Uyghur genocide" vote in parliament to pass this February. Jonah recently wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.
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