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Statement from the National Assembly
of People’s Power
IN
the wake of a media campaign mounted by powerful
corporations, fundamentally in Europe, which have
ferociously attacked Cuba, and after a dirty debate,
the European Parliament has just passed a resolution
of condemnation against our country that manipulates
sentiments, brandishes lies and conceals realities.
The
pretext utilized was the death of a prisoner,
initially sentenced for a common crime and
subsequently manipulated by U.S. interests and
mercenaries at its service, who, of his own free
will, refused to eat, despite warnings from and
intervention by Cuban medical specialists.
This
lamentable event cannot be utilized to condemn Cuba
by adducing that a death could have been avoided. If
there is one field in which our country does not
have to defend itself in words, given that the
reality is irrefutable, it is in that of the fight
for the lives of human beings, whether born in Cuba
or in other countries. Just one example is the
presence of Cuban doctors in Haiti for more than 11
years prior to the earthquake in January of this
year, a fact silenced by the hegemonic press.
Behind that condemnation lies profound cynicism. How
many children’s lives have been lost in poor nations
because of the decision by rich countries
represented in the European Parliament not to meet
their commitments to development aid? All of them
knew it was a mass death sentence, but they opted to
preserve the levels of waste and the continuation of
consumerism to suicide in the long term.
We
Cubans are also offended by that attempt to teach us
a lesson at a time when immigrants and the
unemployed are being repressed in Europe, but while
here, in neighborhood meetings, people are proposing
their candidates for municipal elections, freely and
without intermediaries.
Those countries which participated in or allowed the
clandestine air transport of detainees, the
establishment of illegal prisons, and the practice
of torture, lack the ethical authority to pass moral
judgments on a people under attack and brutally
blockaded.
Such
a discriminatory and selective condemnation can only
be explained by the failure of a policy incapable of
bringing a heroic people to their knees. Neither the
Helms Burton Act, nor the European common position,
which emerged in the same year in the same
circumstances and with the same purpose, both of
them damaging to our national sovereignty and
dignity, have the most minimal future, because we
Cubans reject imposition, intolerance and pressure
as a norm within international relations.
National Assembly of People’s Power of the Republic
of Cuba
March 11, 2010
Translated by Granma International
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