Cuba

A year ago, from this same rostrum, I began my statement by reading some 10 hair-raising news items of the moment from the international press, on bellicose conflicts, violence and death in the cities and deadly epidemics claiming new victims. Intending to do this again today, I found that the situation remains the same, or is perhaps even worse. Unfortunately, the world wasted another 12 months without doing anything to stop such catastrophic events. As if it were necessary to illustrate this with specific facts, even as we gathered here we once again witnessed the bloodshed of the heroic Palestinian people. First and foremost, I denounce the new Israeli aggression and the policy of hegemony that defends these acts, and I express support for our Palestinian brothers in their struggle for their legitimate right to finally have an independent state, with Jerusalem its capital. Also about a year ago, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, the country of the President of the General Assembly, very rightly stated that the United Nations should support the collective needs of peoples and nations in order to serve humanity as a whole, and that it was therefore necessary to correct the trend of making them an instrument of the wealthy and the powerful. Today it must be recognized that we are meeting again without having removed that danger. Hence, in expressing my Government’s satisfaction at having President Razali lead us in our work, I cannot but express confidence that his diplomatic professionalism, his personal achievements and his long and proven experience in the work of this Organization will give him strength in leading us in a remarkably difficult and complex session of the General Assembly. Far from being more democratic and universal, the Organization in which we come together today is tending to tighten more and more the exclusive circle of those who govern it. The just demands heard from this rostrum are now sounding the alarm at the march of ideas being promoted mainly in our host country. Just a few weeks ago, the Chairman of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued an ultimatum for the United Nations to carry out reforms in accordance with the prescriptions of that country or else face the consequences. His articles in renowned publications question precisely the principles on which this institution is founded, particularly the principle of sovereign equality of States. For this influential United States politician and those who identify themselves with his primitive views, there is only one argument: some States deserve more privileges than others. In this way they try to make a dead letter of the principle of sovereign equality of States, the cornerstone of the Charter adopted over 50 years ago in San Francisco. But there is more: the Government of the United States of America, which owes the United Nations the shameful amount of over $1.5 billion, assumes, with no embarrassment whatsoever, the right to determine unilaterally who can or cannot be the Secretary-General of the United Nations and to declare how an Organization deliberately deprived of the resources required for the fulfilment of its functions should or should not be managed. Eighty per cent of the work of the United Nations system is devoted to assisting the developing countries and to strengthening their ability to help themselves. This endeavour includes the aspiration to receive fair treatment in international economic relations; to try to save children from starvation and disease; to promote emergency assistance to refugees and disaster victims; to attempt to combat crime, drug addiction and disease; to promote education and the development of human resources; and to tackle the enormous task of halting or slowing the progressive ecological deterioration of our planet. These are precisely the functions that the notorious United States Senator is trying to abolish, and it is because of the existence of those programmes that the managerial approach of the Secretary-General is so fiercely attacked. That position of the planet’s most powerful country is not aimed against one person; rather, using the question of the Organization’s efficiency as a pretext, it stands against the United Nations mandate to attend to the needs of the great majority of mankind. It is a new and gross attempt to impose on the community of nations the will of a single State in the management of the multilateral forum of cooperation that should be the most representative and democratic one in the world. We should ask ourselves if we, the members of this Assembly, can passively accept the threat posed by this unilateral imposition. It is fitting to recall what Harry 24 Truman said of the Charter of the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference in 1945: “If we fail to use it, we shall betray all those who have died in order that we might meet here in freedom and safety to create it. “If we seek to use it selfishly — for the advantage of any one nation or any small group of nations — we shall be equally guilty of that betrayal.” (Documents of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco, 1945, vol. 1, p. 687) Further comment is unnecessary; subsequent history has been quite eloquent enough. But the most dangerous thing, as has often been said, is that the United Nations is merely the reflection of the world in which we live. This domineering unilateralism shows up even more crudely in the daily conduct of international relations. In a world in which relations of respect, good-neighbourliness and cooperation among the peoples and Governments should be fostered every day, the fact is that one Power, resting on its unquestionable economic, military and technological might, seeks to impose rules and norms of conduct on the rest of the world, thus undermining the sovereign rights of each and every one of our nations. What political, legal or moral reason underlies and legitimizes the missile attack against the Republic of Iraq by the United States Armed Forces just a few days ago? What principles or claims can be used to cover up the unilateral and unjustified use of force? The Security Council did not yield to that unilateral aggression, but it has not been able to formulate a clear position on the matter because of its well-known structural and procedural deficiencies and also because of the tolerance and impunity with which the international community has recently accepted the haughty arrogance of a Government that assumes the right to punish sovereign nations at its whim under spurious pretexts. There is no justification for trampling the territorial integrity of a full-fledged Member of this Organization, and even less for that action to be taken by a single Government, nor for threatening the peace and security of a region inhabited by tens of millions of persons. And all this has taken place while the political experts of the aggressor country could not agree on which was its strongest motivation: the wretched oil interests or the frenzy of the ongoing carnival-like electoral campaign in the United States. It is incredible that world politics can be paralysed, that foreign ministries postpone decisions and that Governments advance or delay responses to national or international dilemmas, thinking only of their repercussions in that North American simulacrum of democracy. Anything can happen, and no country, legal precept or moral principle seems to be safe. Fortunately, the super-elections are held only every four years, because if they took place annually, like the sessions of the General Assembly, living on this planet would be true madness. The Helms-Burton Act, aimed against everyone’s sovereignty and against Cuba, a sovereign State, was conceived as an additional effort to subdue our people through hunger and poverty. It is an eloquent example of the absurd will to impose imperial designs on sovereign and independent countries in the conduct of their own international and trade relations. For that reason, it has been unanimously rejected by the international community. That law, ignoring the General Assembly resolutions on the issue, is intended to strengthen further the blockade against our country. For a century — and especially during the last 37 years — the Cuban people have had to face the hegemonic vocation of successive United States Governments. The extraterritorial ambitions of our neighbour, its attempts to question the sovereign decisions of another State and its violation of the universally recognized principles of international trade are realities with which Cuba has been familiar for a long time. When we denounced the crime that was about to take place, it was neither to frighten nor to play with anyone. The Helms-Burton Act, the most sophisticated bungle of the economic war against Cuba, attacks many countries and compels them to experience in their own sovereignty what we Cubans have been facing for a long time. The world can now better understand what so many years of continuous offences and extraterritorial acts have meant for my homeland. Another instance of unipolarity and of the attempt to dictate the conduct of sovereign States is the law known as D’Amato-Kennedy, which has also received universal repudiation. It repeats the philosophy of imposition and ratifies the tendency to apply United States law beyond its borders. The argument for this is the alleged war against terrorism, when, in fact, the United States was the main promoter of terrorism in its dirty wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola and South Africa, against the 25 Palestinian patriots and in many other countries — the United States has always supported the bloodiest regimes that have ever existed in this world. There are just causes and unjust causes. No one will ever have the right to kill innocent people, regardless of the objectives being pursued. This does not negate any people’s right to use weapons against its oppressors: to fight cleanly, yes; to kill innocents, never. A State cannot be allowed to arrogate to itself the right to accuse, condemn and sanction other nations and to impose by force an illegitimate crusade that often serves to disguise the real terrorists. Cuba — which has been the victim of many terrorist actions and has for many years faced repeated attempts on the lives of its political leaders, as well as sabotage, biological warfare, the destruction of a passenger plane in flight and the hijacking of aircraft, and which suffers even today from armed infiltrations and which has been, above all, the victim of brutal economic terrorism — expects a joint and conscious effort from the international community to address the terrorism that has its origins in Langley, Virginia — that is to say, at the Central Intelligence Agency — and later spreads to many countries of the world. Drug trafficking, in our opinion, should be dealt with in the same manner. The drug issue should not be transformed into an instrument of pressure against underdeveloped countries, many of which do not have sufficient resources to tackle this scourge. This problem has taken on global dimensions and can be confronted only by sharing responsibilities and using the mechanisms offered by the United Nations. The policy of conferring arbitrary certifications is unacceptable, and even more so is its use as a pretext to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. The country whose enormous rates of consumption have become the main market for and driving force behind this criminal industry, the country in whose territory the greatest profits of this business are generated, does not have the moral authority to assign responsibility to or demand it from others. What would happen if the world, truly concerned by the scourge of drugs, were to decertify unanimously the greatest drug consumer? To put it another way, people who live in glass houses should not throw stones, and he who has a beam in his eye should not be so concerned about the mote in another’s. No one can disregard the immense influence of the United States in the so-called post-cold-war period, but mankind would be making a mistake if it were to look with indifference upon the currents of thought within that country that entertain the possibility of governing the rest of the world or of acting with utter disregard for the rights and interests of other peoples. We are facing a King Kong escaped from his cage, destroying and crushing everything around him, aimlessly and out of control. We are not trying to convince this forum that the United States is the source of all the evils of the planet, but it would be a mistake to ignore reality and not to take timely preventive actions — preferably collective ones — to admonish to sanity the persons charged with guiding that country politically, to do so with a minimum of responsibility and to understand that the power of any nation, important as it might be, has its limits. The world is more plagued by uncertainty today than when the new world order was demagogically proclaimed. On the threshold of the new millennium, the numbers of armed conflicts between States, ethnic groups and religions have increased. What we see everywhere is not a new order but, rather, a disquieting world in perfect disorder. The social and economic consequences of these conflicts have no parallel in contemporary history, but we cannot simply pretend that military imposition, coercion and sanctions are a universal panacea that can solve the numerous humanitarian problems of the world. Inequalities, rampant underdevelopment, globalization and the interdependence that is increasingly turning into the worst form of dependency should disappear so that these new conflicts may, in turn, be eradicated for ever from this world, which, based on injustice, is becoming increasingly ungovernable. Economic models based on neoliberal philosophy have spread throughout much of the third world with the support of the international financial institutions. Although these models have generated deceptive, apparently attractive macroeconomic indicators, in practice they go hand in hand with an increase in poverty, marginalization, environmental degradation, disease, ignorance, social conflict, a loss of national resources and sovereignty — in short, with the most brutal and increasingly irreversible underdevelopment. This neoliberal school of thought is based on artificial paradigms that should be unmasked. It is false that the market, with its magical invisible hand, is the definitive solution for the immense disruptions affecting the international economy and that it is the miraculous 26 remedy that would liberate many countries, home to the vast majority of the earth’s population, from underdevelopment and poverty. It is false that absolute privatization, which can benefit only the few, brings well-being to the legions of the poor and the wretched living in the third world. It is false that geography determines the economic power of peoples. It is false that genetics determines which human beings are born to be poor and wretched and which are born under the shining star of wealth and extravagance. It is false that the State or Government is the main source of corruption and inefficiency and should renounce responsibility for welfare, health and education, leaving these obligations mainly in private hands whose motivations will always be limited and discriminatory and are frequently based on greed. It is false that the poor, the oppressed and the exploited should have a lesser role in ultra-modern societies. It is false that social justice and equity always have to be sacrificed for the sake of commercial efficiency. It is false that the total removal of protection for national industries in the developing countries will yield higher productivity, wealth, employment and well-being for their peoples. It is false that the sovereignty of nations is an outmoded principle of international coexistence and that Governments and countries are ready to abandon it because of the strength of transnational capital and the social- political models exported by the North. Finally, it is false that the neoliberal models that have been sold to us will raise the indicators or levels of human development set as objectives by the United Nations. One should check the statistics and compare annual reports, not just between one country and another, but also between indicators for the third world from one year to the next in areas such as infant mortality, poverty, education, life expectancy, access to drinking water, human settlements, schooling for children, and doctors per number of inhabitants. All these falsities, many of them recorded in United Nations documents, hide the bankruptcy of development prospects for most of the poor countries, which is already threatening world stability and aggravating the ecological deterioration we all recognized several years ago at the historic Rio Conference. The poor are already falling into the immense and ever wider chasm separating them from the rich, who continue to grow disproportionately and irresponsibly without realizing that sooner or later their own weight will also drag them down into the same pit. And, in this aberrant context, what are we to say about the arms race? The rivalry between the big Powers and the arms race have supposedly disappeared. Why, then, in spite of the adoption of international instruments supposedly to that end, is there such resistance to real nuclear disarmament that will free humanity for ever from that scourge? Who is responsible for the fact that the recently adopted Treaty to ban all nuclear tests does not cover simulated laboratory tests in which new lethal weapons will be perfected by those who monopolize them, or any commitment to the destruction of arsenals? Unless we discover life in other galaxies, where will the enemies endangering the big Powers come from? Fifty-one years after the creation of the United Nations, instead of seeing wealth and development extend from the North to the South, we see the growing threat of underdevelopment moving inexorably from the South to the North. It is said that hunger and poverty are on the rise. In fact, what has also happened is that wealth is more and more concentrated, increasingly exclusive and limited, while walls higher than the one that fell in Berlin are being built. Let us be frank: the North is not as rich as it seems, nor is the South as poor as they want to make it. Almost all the wealth of the North comes from the wealth and resources of the South. And all the hunger and poverty of the South is nothing other than the legacy of over 500 years of exploitation and disregard for our human rights. If we cannot reverse this situation collectively, by sharing the burden and improving living conditions in the developing countries, no one will be able to stop the waves of migrants attracted by the siren’s song of wealthy and opulent societies. The United Nations has a vast arsenal of documents, resolutions and initiatives conceived for those purposes 27 but never implemented. Soon it will be too late. Today we can still act. While all this is happening, the blockade of Cuba continues. With the Helms-Burton Act, it has become even clearer that it is not just an embargo, because in the last few months, the United States, through its words and deeds, has sent the world sure signals that what is really being waged against my country is a long and dirty economic war for total control over our sovereignty and our markets. The criminal blockade, as part of its frightening network of measures created over 35 years, has now a Draconian law that publicly calls for a world crusade to change forcibly the Cuban constitutional order and undo a revolution defended by our people at the cost of their lives. What have we come to when United States diplomats, on the ugliest mission since the Viet Nam war, tell the world that they are granting it a few months’ sovereignty before trampling upon it if the world does not join their war on Cuba? I am fulfilling the mandate bestowed on me by the free people of Cuba to proclaim in front of the international community of nations that we will persevere in our efforts to defend our social, political and economic actions aimed at ensuring equality, justice and well-being for all Cubans. Our own experience is the best contribution we can make as a nation towards meeting the enormous challenges facing humanity, as has been shown by Cuba’s economic, political and social achievements in the last year. A country that has overcome a serious economic crisis, that maintains its governability, that grows and develops with the solidarity of many, that expands its relations throughout the world and that grows stronger — this is a country with a future. The socialism we have chosen for our homeland is our only emancipatory, moral and ethical alternative, with roots firmly planted in the history of our nation. It is a path that we chose in freedom and sovereignty, a path that we shall not renounce and that no one imposed on us. We wish to live in harmony with all the countries of the world, including the United States. Cuba wants and needs peace. But let us be clear: Cuba is not and never will be willing to sacrifice, under pressure from anyone or in exchange for anything, the independence, sovereignty and self-determination that it has achieved and defended at such a high price. Today, in that blue Caribbean that shelters us, we Cubans will continue with our heads held high, with our feet on the ground and with our eyes on the future. Thus do we defend our choice: to live in the free and sovereign homeland dreamed of by our founding fathers and achieved by our fathers and grandfathers. Let there be no doubt. We shall overcome.