Armando García, Department for International Relations, Central
Committee
Communist Party of Cuba
Contribution to the International Communist Seminar
"Imperialism, Fascisation and Fascism"
Brussels, 2-4 May 2000
A few months before the conclusion of a century and with it, of a millenium, we are again forced to consider the significance, and the consequences for the Cuban people, of the hostile policies of the successive North-American governments during the past more than 40 years. We hope that our intervention will reflect the contribution of the struggle of Cuba in her confrontation with imperialism and with the extreme rightists and fascists that her existence has brought about.
For several months, the case of the Cuban child Elián González, illegally kidnapped in the US and prevented from being reunited with his father and his genuine family, has been subject to a monstruous manipulation. This has been promoted, financed and directed by elements of the North-American extreme Right, linked to the Cuban-American maffia in the South of the US. Their objective has always been to discredit and isolate the Cuban revolution.
We have the right — not only we, Cubans, but all honest and progressive people on earth — to ask ourselves what are the circumstances that have led to such an unjust situation. And we’ll always find at the origin of these events, one of the most distorted measures applied to Cuba by the US government: the so-called Cuban Settlement Act.
As it is well-known, on the hypocritical pretext of supporting supposedly persecuted people in Cuba, during its 33 years of validity this law has been a stimulus to illegal migration. This is at the basis of the tragic fate of the small Elián. Therefore, and with reason, Cuba has stated that the case does not only concern the urgent handing over of the kidnapped child to his social and family surroundings in our country, but the elimination of this legislation which constitutes both a provocation and an act of discrimination.
Under the protection of this law, you have the absurdity that candidate migrants from Cuba to the US are denied entrance visa by the US, only to be received afterwards as heroes on US territory.
The list of people who have traveled illegally to the US under the protection of this law is very long. To attain their objective, these people take over boats or airplanes, commit crimes on their way out, or endanger the lives of others. And not a single one of them has been brought back to Cuba to be tried for the criminal acts related to their flight. Worse, the majority of these migrants are not at all harassed in the US, where they live in complete liberty.
As if all this were not enough, lately the smuggling of goods and migrants from Cuba by people residing in the US, using US-registered boats, with contracts and financial support from there, and violating US laws, has been on the increase. Here again, we see the complicity of people who are fomenting a similar policy. In less than two years, from April 1998 to February 2000, 60 people have been detained in Cuba because of this criminal trafficking, while in the US not a single smuggler has been brought before the law.
The US authorities have kept silent on the offer of the Cuban government to extradite these smugglers to the US, following the principle that the principal crime has been committed on US territory and that they should thus be tried there. Comrade Fidel Castro recently declared, correctly: "How many lives of our people has this Settlement Act cost in its 33 years of existence? How many lives of innocent children, taken away from their schools, brought into danger by irresponsable mothers or fathers, or enticed by illusions, or by vile campaigns and exhortations that result from the massive propaganda from the country that, at the same time, blockades us and tries to kill us with hunger and disease."
The US government is once more the main actor in a new and recent episode of its war against Cuba. This time, the incident happened in the context of the Human Rights Commission of the UN in Geneva. The case clearly illustrates the mechanisms of pressure and blackmail that are used to distort and deform institutions that were created for other purposes.
As it is well-known, after having manipulated this Commission for a long period in favor of its anti-Cuban proposals, just two years ago the US was unequivocally defeated in its draft resolution to condemn Cuba on the pretext of human rights violations. That triumph of justice and reason should have been sufficient to end this shameful exercise once and for all.
But this was not the case. Experiencing defeat led the strategists of the empire to the formula of leaving the job of publicly presenting a draft resolution against Cuba to some of their docile satellites, although it was obviously elaborated and prepared by Washington. This farcical show prevailed in last year’s session, and it was only upon enormous pressures and threats that the US obtained a vote favorable to them, with a minimal margin of one vote.
Just a few days ago, again with the servile collaboration of the government of the Czech Republic, the US imposed on this institution the approval of a resolution against Cuba, with the support of their allies in Europa, of the NATO and in Asia, and above all, by means of an extraordinary offensive of threats, pressures and blackmail on the more vulnerable countries and governments.
This way, we find ourselves before the absurd fact that the country that violates the human rights of the Cuban people by means of an unjust economic, commercial and financial blockade, that is universally condemned, turns itself into the supposed judge of this people. This has nothing to do with a triumph of ideas and neither is this the fruit of an honest and balanced debate, rather to the contrary. More than anything, this shows that the rich and powerful developed countries, with the US at their helm, have to a large extent been able to convert the Human Rights Commission of Geneva into a tribunal of Inquisition of the developed world against the Third World.
If we would really think of this Commission as a legitimate instrument for the protection and the promotion of human rights, how should we than understand that this organ has never implemented a single measure in relation to the charges it has heard about the US. Charges that show the repeated and flagrant violations of the most essential rights of the African-Americans, the indigenous peoples, the migrant workers and the millions of North-Americans who live in poverty.
It cannot be accepted that the US government, this self-declared model in respecting human rights, has always voted in the Geneva Commission against resolutions that oppose the crimes of Israel in the occupied Arab territories, the use of embargoes and economic relations as a unilateral means of coercion, the use of States for the recruitment of mercenaries, or that proclaim the rights of all people to food.
All these dirty dealings show that, beyond the words and the campaigns of those who monopolize the major means of communication, it are not legitimate concerns for human rights that form the basis for the US moves. It is the objective to discredit and insult the Cuban Revolution, serving to justify their politics of aggression, war and blockade, that last already for more than 40 years.
By presenting facts and circumstances of the most recent period, I have tried to show the methods and the nature of the forces and positions of the extreme Right that determine US policy towards Cuba.
These events are but the latest episode of the historical hostility of the US against the Cuban nation. This has included direct military intervention, the organization of invasions by mercenaries, maintaining and strengthening a cruel and unjust economic, commercial and financial blockade, actions of biological warfare by means of the introduction of bacteria to cause diseases among the civil population and plagues on crops and cattle, the criminal support and stimulation of illegal migration, the stimulation, organization and overt or covert funding of terrorist activities against the security of Cuban society, and assassination attempts against Cuba’s principal leaders.
In the middle of last year and in the beginning of this year, a group of Cuban social, people’s and student organizations — who together make up practically the total Cuban population — presented two judicial demands against the US government for damage claims and indemnification of the damages caused by the death of
3.478 Cuban citizens, in the first case, and for economic and other damage caused by illegal acts, in the second case.
The indictment is based in the first place on the proofs that the Cuban authorities and institutions have made available, and also on the content of declassified secret documents of the US government. Among them is the "Covert Action Program against the Castro Regime", proposed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and approved by the latter on 17 March 1960. This program authorized the use of covert actions against Cuba, including pirate attacks by air and by sea, and the promotion and direct support of counterrevolutionary groups inside Cuba. It assigned also the necessary funds to the CIA.
According to the report of the Inspector General of the CIA, Lyman Kirkpatrick, elaborated in 1961 and recently declassified, the CIA station in Miami, dedicated to the activities against Cuba, came to have 588 people, thus making it one of the biggest stations of the secret services.
Thus began a period of covert warfare against Cuba, with armed bandits. For years these groups, organized by the CIA, received weapons, ammunition, explosives, communications equipment and logistics from the US government, by air, by sea and even through diplomatic channels.
This banditism was finally defeated in 1965. During this five years’ struggle, 549 people died and considerably more were wounded.
In April 1961 there was the invasion by mercenaries in the Cuban Bay of Pigs, also organized by the CIA and approved by Presidents Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. It came to be a major defeat, politically and militarily, for the US government. In the few days that this operation lasted, 176 fighters and civilians lost their lives and more than 300 were wounded.
Terrorism has been a permanent instrument of the US government’s policy against Cuba. In the long list of terrorist acts against our country, we can point out the sabotage of the French ship La Coubre, realized by CIA agents upon its disembarkation at the warf of Havana harbor on March 4, 1960, resulting in 101 dead and hundreds of injured. There was also the monstruous sabotage of a civilian airplane of Cubana de Aviación. It exploded during its flight, near Barbados in October 1976, resulting in the death of its 76 passengers and crew.
With the changes of the last few years in the international scene, the forms of State terrorism used against Cuba has also varied. At the end of the Bush administration, the most reactionary sectors of the Cuban migrant community in the US gave a new impetus to terrorist activity. Since 1992 up to this day, the National Cuban-American Foundation, which funds presidential campaigns and those of well-known US Senators and Congressmen, has organized and funded this new activity. It consists mainly of the contractualization of mercenaries of Cuban origin in the US and of mercenaries in Central-American countries to place bombs in tourist infrastructure and in other particularly significant places. In 1997, seven bombs went off in hotels in the Cuban capital, one of them causing the death of an Italian tourist.
A document officially approved on 6 April 1960 by L. D. Mallory, an important State Department official, stated with cynical impudence that "the only acceptable way to alienate internal support is by means of discontent and discouragement based on dissatisfaction and economic difficulties. (…) We should soon use whatever conceivable means to debilitate the economic life of Cuba. (…) A course of action that could have the most impact is to deny money and aid to Cuba, to diminish the real and monetary salaries with the aim of causing hunger, dispair and the collapse of the government." This was, in short, the programmatic platform that would be the basis, the next forty years and until today, of the North-American economic blockade against Cuba.
On 3 January 1961, the US government announced the breakup of its diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba. On 31 January, through a Presidential Decree signed by Kennedy, Cuba’s sugar quota to the US market, that used to be in the amount of 3 million tons, were canceled.
In January 1962, during the Eighth Consultative Assembly of the Foreign Ministers of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, the maneuvers to politically isolate Cuba in the Western hemisphere culminated. Upon intense pressure, the US delegation obtained the approval of a series of resolutions that resulted in the suspension of Cuba from the OAS and in the breakup of bilateral diplomatic relations with the majority of Latin-American countries. It was against this background that President Kennedy decreed, on 3 February 1962, a total commercial blockade between the US and Cuba.
The approval of the so-called Torricelli Act, part of the Defense Budget Act of 1992, intensified the embargo measures, prohibiting trade with Cuba by daughters of US companies based in third countries. For the Cuban economy, the elimination of trade with those companies, which was for 90% in foodstuffs and medicines, was an additional blow in the critical conjuncture of the early 1990s.
The approval, in March 1996, of the so-called Helms-Burton Act was another important step, without doubt the most infamous and dangerous, in the escalation of economic warfare against Cuba. This law intends to cut the flow of foreign direct investments in Cuba by intimidating existing or potential investors, using as instrument for blackmail the nationalization of US property effected by the Cuban government in the context of national and international law, and the alleged lack of compensation for these properties.
This overview, incomplete as it is, constitutes an enormous accusation that leaves no doubt about the actions undertaken against the Cuban people since 1959.
In the middle of these difficulties, aggravated by today’s complexity of international relations, the struggle of Cuba is developing. They want us to accept a new world order, based on the hegemony of a sole superpower, with the neoliberal globalization as doctrine and with the NATO converted in policeman and instrument for such a strategic design.
In an inevitably ever more globalized world, the last two decades an accelerated neoliberal process has been imposed by the major developed countries, particulary the US and the big transnational corporations. This has only brought about economic failure and social catastrophe. The divide between the rich countries and the Third World becomes larger every day. Today, the old saying that the rich get ever richer and the poor ever poorer, is probably more valid than ever.
In these conditions, for Cuba the decade that has just ended has brought difficult challenges and new dangers, resulting from the abrupt loss of her economic relations with the disappeared USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe, and from the unprecedented strengthening of the North-American blockade.
But the efforts to isolate Cuba and destroy the Cuban Revolution have failed. Every day the universal condemnation of the blockade grows, as well as the help that comes in the most varied ways.
In the middle of these limitations, the Cuban society has not abandoned its principles of solidarity. It suffices to mention that at this moment more than 8000 young people coming from mainly Third World countries are studying in Cuba, including those that are enrolled in the Latin-American School for Medical Sciences.
In the same way, 1.642 medical doctors and health specialists are offering their free services in Latin America, the Carribean and Africa, caring for a population of more than 10 million people.
Only a few days ago, Cuba hosted the first summit of the so-called Group of 77, which groups the Third World countries. At the Havana meeting, more than 120 delegations of these countries came together, 42 of them led by heads of States or governments. This meeting, strangely absent in the mainstream media in the US and Europe, expressed the growing conscientization of the poor countries about the depth of the crisis they are confronting and about the inequality and the discrimination they are suffering. It was beyond any doubt a hopeful signal.
At the same time, and yet confronted with so many odds, the course of economic recovery of our country is continuing, without abandoning the basic principles of our society. Last year the economic growth rate reached 6,2% of the Gross Domestic Product, and this year it should be no less that 4 or 4,5%.
We are fully aware of the difficulties that we are facing in the struggle that awaits us. We will never give up working for a world that is more just and has more solidarity, in which every people finds a worthy place to belong.
Thank you very much.