By Catholic Relief Services (CRS) will deliver kits of prepackaged food and hygiene kits for up to 700 Cuban families.
The United States and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) sent the first flight with humanitarian aid to Cuba under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s $100 million assistance plan.
In partnership with the Catholic Church and Caritas Cuba, the kits of prepackaged food and hygiene kits for up to 700 Cuban families will be delivered by CRS — the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the U.S.
“This partnership builds upon the success of the Department’s program last year with CRS and Caritas Cuba to deliver $9 million in direct support to the island following Hurricane Melissa,” according to a U.S. Department of State statement.
“Building on the success of the previous program, the direct delivery of humanitarian commodities by local parish representatives in the island will ensure critical U.S. assistance reaches everyday Cubans in need, without any opportunity for regime diversion or theft,” the department said.
CRS sent the flight on July 21 from Miami with Jeremy Lewin, Rubio’s senior adviser and director of foreign assistance, and Viviana Bovo, senior adviser for the department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.
The supplies sent are the first humanitarian relief sent under Rubio’s commitment of $100 million in humanitarian assistance to the Cuban people, as they “are suffering from the consequences of the Communist regime’s kleptocracy, brutality, and economic incompetence,” the statement said.
The aid is part of a $60 million award to CRS from the department’s $100 million fund for expanding humanitarian assistance to vulnerable families across Cuba.
“The award will enable CRS, in partnership with Caritas Cuba, to provide emergency food and hygiene supplies to nearly 200,000 households, or more than half a million people, across the country and essential household items — including mattresses and blankets — to another 7,000 people who need them,” CRS said in a press release.
“Families in Cuba are facing growing hardship as they struggle to put food on the table, access clean water and meet other basic needs,” said Sean Callahan, CRS president and CEO, in the press release.
“This support will allow CRS and our long-standing partner, Caritas Cuba, to significantly expand humanitarian assistance through the Catholic Churchʼs trusted network, reaching vulnerable families with the help they urgently need.”
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Tread softly when working with governments. We must not be yoked with the secular powers for we know who controls them.
Br. Jaques, I get the point. But could be better put: “ who CAN control them”.
Who?
Now that is a prudent caution.
Clearly this caution is not one understood by the USCCB or any of the other “Catholic” charities that have their lips firmly planted against teat of the public treasury and derive significant amounts of revenue from the state-blind to risks succintly expressed as Qui aurum habet, praecepta facit (he who has the gold, makes the rules).
This is from a paper entitled “Mission Capture”
Authors:
Michael P. Carniol
Rutgers University∗
Paul E. Fischer
University of Pennsylvania
October 2020 (Available on SSRN)
“Organizations that produce public goods, such as educational institutions, religious organizations, and other public charities, rely on contributions from both large and small donors. In many cases, large donors make restricted contributions for particular activities, projects, or initiatives and the organization must allocate those funds according to those restrictions. These restrictions provide a donor with assurance that its contribution is deployed according to specified preferences. Such restrictions also may offer a means for a large donor to exert influence over the bundle of public good produced by the organization, which we refer to as the mission. As a consequence, in some cases an organization must make a trade-off between altering the organization’s mission to align it with the large donor’s contribution restrictions, which we refer to as mission capture, or to forgo the large donor’s contribution in order to sustain a mission that otherwise would be preferred by its small donor base. ”
It’s outside the scope of the paper, but this can be made even more severe when the capture is made by a more hostile or coercive state, then it might be mission corruption.
“. . . without any opportunity for regime diversion or theft.”
Why is this not standard procedure? (Hopelessly naive question, no doubt.)