HE Sergio Manuel Martínez González, Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba to Antigua and Barbuda
By Sergio Martinez Gonzalez.
Cuban Ambassador in Antigua and Barbuda.
Under the important and decisive leadership of the People’s Republic of China, in its capacity as current President of the United Nations Security Council, an open debate on “Upholding the Purposes and Principles of the Charter of the United Nations and Strengthening the UN-Centered International System” was held at UN Headquarters last Tuesday. The meeting was attended by a large number of countries represented at the United Nations.
Never before in recent times, has been so crucial for all humanity the struggle for peace and peaceful coexistence among states, the observance of international law and compliance with the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter, including respect for sovereignty and the right to self-determination of peoples, the respect for the sacred right to life, among others.
At this important gathering, the vast majority of those participants raised their voices in favor of building a just and democratic multilateral international order based on the sovereign equality of all countries, regardless of their size or level of development.
On behalf of the Cuban people, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla reiterated his condemnation of the inhumane impact that the strengthening of the economic, financial, and commercial blockade imposed by the US Government against Cuba for more than 64 years has had on the lives of more than 10 million Cubans, and especially the most recent measures taken by the current administration of Donald Trump, including those aimed at preventing the entry of a single drop of oil into Cuba, seeking total economic strangulation and to cause the greatest possible level of hardship in the lives of Cubans.
He emphasized how the oil or energy blocked that the United States applies to Cuba is equivalent in its effects, to a naval blockade, which is an act of war and genocide.
It subjects the Cuban population to conditions that threaten its integrity and existence, and constitutes a cruel and indiscriminate “collective punishment” that today causes deaths, as is reflected, in the doubling of the infant mortality rate from 4.0 to 9.2 per thousand live births, or the reduction of the life expectancy of children with cancer from 85 to 65%.
This is an unprecedented and completely unjustified unilateral aggression. Through intimidation and “secondary” sanctions, applicable to third parties, the United States government seeks to force all states to participate, against their will, in its atrocious measures against Cuba, or to maintain a complicit silence in the face of this cruel policy.
Cuba denounced the very real threat that exists today that United States Government, using vile pretexts, could carry out a military intervention with the long-held objective of what they call a “regime change” and destroying the Cuban Revolution. Such aggression would provoke a bloodbath.
Thousands of Cubans would die defending their homeland and sacred values and ideals, and young Americans would also perish, without a cause or ideal to defend, dragged into violence by an imperial, neo-fascist policy of domination, plunder, and conquest.
We reiterate our call to the governments and peoples of the world, and especially to our Caribbean brothers, with whom we share indestructible historical ties of brotherhood and friendship, to raise their voices in a sovereign manner and denounce the attempts by the US Government to try to subjugate a small nation through genocidal policies of economic and social strangulation, and to unequivocally reject the threats to impose its imperial interests of domination by military force.
Echoing the words of Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez and on behalf of the Cuban people, we humbly ask that the time has come for solidarity with Cuba, a country that has always been supportive of everyone, never hesitating to put aside risks, sometimes deadly; nor its own interests or material shortages.
The tile to support Cuba should have been long ago. I guess we scared of the repercussions from the US