I am bringing to this Assembly the voice of the South, the voice of the “exploited and scorned” — the words of Ernesto Che Guevara in this same Hall almost 60 years ago (see A/PV.1299).
We are diverse peoples with the same problems. We just confirmed that recently in Havana, which was honoured to host a summit of leaders and other high representatives of the Group of 77 (G77) and China, the most representative, broad and diverse group in the multilateral arena.
During those two virtually non-stop days, more than 100 representatives from the 134 nations that comprise the Group raised their voices to call for changes that can no longer be postponed amid the unjust, irrational and abusive international economic order that, year after year, has deepened the enormous inequalities between a minority of very developed nations and a majority that has not managed to shed the euphemism of “developing nations”.
Worse still, as recognized by the Secretary-General at the Havana Summit, the G77 was founded six decades ago to repair centuries of injustice and abandonment and. in today’s convulsive world, they are entangled in a host of world crises, where poverty is on the rise and hunger is ever-growing.
We are brought together by the need to change that which remains unresolved and by the condition of being the main victims of the current global multidimensional crisis, the abusive unequal exchange, the scientific and technical gap and the degradation of the environment. But we have also been brought together, for more than half a century now. by the inescapable challenge and the determination to transform the current international order, which is exclusionary, irrational, unsustainable for the planet and non-viable for the well-being of all.
The countries represented in the G77 and China, where 80 per cent of the global population lives, face not only the challenge of development, but also the responsibility to modify the structures that marginalize us from global progress and turn many peoples of the South into laboratories of renewed forms of domination. A new and more just global contract is urgently needed.
Only seven years ahead of the deadline set for the implementation of the promising 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the panorama is discouraging. This institution has already recognized that. At the current pace, none of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals will be achieved and more than half of the 169 agreed targets will not be met.
In the midst of the twenty-first century, it shocks the human conscience that almost 800 million persons suffer from hunger in a planet that produces enough to feed everyone and that, in the era of knowledge and accelerated development of information and communication technologies, more than 760 million persons — two thirds women — do not know how to read or write.
The efforts of developing countries are not enough to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They must be supported by concrete actions to provide access to markets, financing under fair and preferential conditions, technology transfer and North-South cooperation. We are not begging for alms or favours.
The G77 clamours for rights and will continue to demand a profound transformation of the current international financial architecture because it is deeply unjust, anachronistic and dysfunctional and because it was designed to profit from the reserves of the South and perpetuate a system of domination that increases underdevelopment and replicates a pattern of modern colonialism.
We need and demand financial institutions in which our countries can have real decision-making capacity and access to financing. We urgently need a recapitalization of multilateral development banks in order to radically improve their lending conditions and meet the financial needs of the South. The member countries of this Group were forced to allocate $379 billion from their reserves to protect their currencies in 2022. almost twice as much the amount of special drawing rights allocated by the International Monetary Fund.
A streamlining, review and change of the role of credit rating agencies is needed. It is also critical to establish criteria beyond gross domestic product to define the access of developing countries to financing under favourable conditions and to adequate technical cooperation.
While the richest countries fail to meet the commitment to allocate at least 0.7 per cent of their gross national income to official development assistance, the nations of the South need to spend up to 14 per cent of their income to service their foreign debt. Most G77 nations are forced to allocate more resources to servicing the debt than to investing in health or education. What sustainable development can be achieved with that noose on their necks?
The Group reiterates today its call on public, multilateral and private creditors to refinance the debt with credit guarantees, lower interests and longer maturities. We insist on the implementation of a multilateral mechanism to renegotiate sovereign debt, with the effective participation of the countries of the South, that will allow for a fair, balanced and development-oriented treatment. It is imperative to redesign, once and for all. the debt instruments and to include activation provisions to alleviate and restructure said debt whenever a country is affected by natural catastrophes or macroeconomic shocks — problems that are so common among the most vulnerable nations.
No one in their right mind is denying now that climate change is threatening the survival of all. with irreversible effects. It is also no secret that those who are least responsible for climate change are the ones suffering the most from its effects, particularly small island developing States. Meanwhile, industrialized countries, voracious predators of resources and the environment, elude their greatest responsibility and fail to comply with their commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement. To mention just one example, it is extremely disappointing that the goal of mobilizing no less than $100 billion a year until 2020. for climate financing, has never once been met.
On the eve of the twenty-eighth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28). the G77 countries will need to prioritize the exercise of a global balance, the implementation of the Loss and Damage Fund, the definition of the framework for the adaptation goal and the establishment of a new climate financing goal, fully abiding by the principle of shared but differentiated responsibilities.
The G77 is organizing a summit of the leaders of the South, to be held on 2 December, in the context of COP28 in Dubai. That initiative, unprecedented in the context of a Conference of the Parties, will provide a forum in which to articulate the positions of our Group at the highest level in the context of the climate negotiations. COP28 will demonstrate whether, beyond the speeches, there is a real political will on the part of developed nations to achieve the urgent agreements required on this issue.
The priority of the G77 is to shift, once and for all. the paradigms of science, technology and innovation, which are limited to the environment and perspectives of the North, thus depriving the international scientific community of considerable intellectual capital. The successful Havana summit launched an urgent appeal to centre science, technology and innovation around the indispensable objective of sustainable development. At the summit, we decided to resume the work of the Consortium on Science. Technology and Innovation for the South in order to promote joint research projects and foster productive linkages aimed at reducing dependence on Northern markets. We also agreed to promote the convening, in 2025. of a high-level meeting of the General Assembly on science, technology and innovation for development.
The 17 cooperation projects that Cuba has set up in the context of its chairmanship of the G77 will contribute to channelling the potential for South South and triangular cooperation. We urge the richest nations and international organizations to participate in those initiatives. Cuba will not relent in its efforts to boost the creative potential, influence and leadership of the G77. Our Group has much to contribute to the multilateralism, stability, justice and rationality that the world requires today.
In addition to all the problems and challenges of the realities of our nations and which are mobilizing peoples, there are unilateral coercive measures — euphemistically called sanctions — which have become a practice of powerful States purporting to act as universal judges to weaken and destroy economies and isolate and subjugate sovereign States. Cuba is not the first sovereign State against which measures of that nature have been applied, but it is the one that has endured them the longest. That is despite the worldwide condemnation of them expressed almost unanimously every year in the Assembly, which is intentionally disrespected and ignored by the Government of the biggest economic, financial and military Power in the world. We were not the first, and we will not the last.
The pressures to isolate and weaken economies and sovereign States are also currently affecting Venezuela and Nicaragua, and. both before and after those cases, they have been the prelude to invasions and the overthrowing of inconvenient Governments in the Middle East. We reject the unilateral coercive measures imposed on countries such as Zimbabwe. Syria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Iran, among many others, whose peoples suffer the negative impact of those measures. We reiterate our solidarity with the cause of the Palestinian people. We support the right to self-determination of the Saharan people. Let us strive for a world of peace, without wars or conflicts.
Five years ago. I spoke for the first time from this rostrum (see A/73/PV.8). where once stood the historic leader of the Cuban revolution. Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz. and Army General Raul Castro Ruz. to speak these truths and the ideals of peace and justice of a small archipelago that has resisted and will continue to resist, reflecting the dignity, courage and unwavering resolve of its people and history. But I cannot stand in this global platform without once again denouncing the fact that for 60 years now. Cuba has been suffering a suffocating economic blockade designed to depress its income and living standards, inflict continuous shortages of food, medicines and other basic supplies and restrict its development potential. That is the nature and those are the objectives of the policy of economic coercion and maximum pressure applied by the Government of the United States against Cuba, in violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.
Cuba has not implemented a single measure or action aimed at harming the United States through damage to its economic sector, trade or social fabric. Cuba has not engaged in any action to threaten the independence or national security of the United States or to impair its sovereign rights, interfere in its internal affairs or affect its people’s well-being. The behaviour of the United States is absolutely unilateral and unjustified. Every day. the Cuban people use creative ways to resist and overcome that merciless economic war which, since 2019. at the height of the coronavirus disease pandemic, has been escalated opportunistically to reach an even more extreme, cruel and inhumane dimension. Its effects have been brutal.
The United States Government pressured entities not to supply the medical oxygen and pulmonary ventilators that were needed in Cuba to face the peak of the pandemic. Our Cuban scientists created the vaccines and developed the pulmonary ventilators needed save our country, and we also made them available to other countries in the world. With surgical and vicious precision. Washington and Florida calculated how to inflict the greatest possible damage on Cuban families.
The United States has tried and continues to try to prevent the supply of fuel and lubricants to our country, an action that would seem unthinkable in peacetime. In a globalized world, it is not only absurd but criminal to prohibit access to technologies, including medical equipment for which more than 10 per cent of the components are from the United States. The United States actions against the medical cooperation provided by Cuba in many nations are shameful. It has gone so far as to openly threaten sovereign Governments that have requested such help to respond to the public health needs of their populations.
The United States deprives its citizens of the right to travel to Cuba, in defiance of its own Constitution. The tightening of the blockade has contributed to an increase in migratory flows registered in our country in recent years, which imposes a painful cost on Cuban families and has adverse demographic and economic consequences for the nation.
The Government of the United States lies and does enormous damage to the international efforts to combat terrorism when it accuses Cuba, without any basis whatsoever, of being a sponsor of that scourge. Under the cover of that arbitrary and fraudulent accusation, it extorts hundreds of banking and financial institutions all over the world, forcing them to choose between continuing their relations with the United States or maintaining their ties with Cuba. Our country is suffering a real siege — an extraterritorial, cruel and silent economic war — one that is supported by a powerful political machinery of destabilization, with billions of dollars in funds approved by the United States Congress, aimed at capitalizing on the shortages caused by the blockade and undermining the constitutional order of the country and the peace of our citizens.
Despite the hostility of the United States Government, we will continue to build bridges with the country’s people, as we do with all the peoples of the world. We will continue to strengthen relations with Cuban emigrants in every corner of the planet.
The promotion and protection of human rights is a common ideal that requires a genuine spirit of respect and constructive dialogue among States. Unfortunately. 75 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the reality is very different. That issue has become a political weapon of powerful nations that seek to subject independent nations, mainly in the South, to their geopolitical designs. No country is exempt from challenges, just as no country has the authority to designate itself as a model for human rights or to stigmatize other models, cultures or sovereign States. We support dialogue and cooperation as effective ways to ensure the promotion and protection of human rights, without politicization or selectivity and without the application of double standards, conditions or pressure.
In that spirit. Cuba submitted its candidacy to the Human Rights Council for the period 2024-2026 in the elections that will be held on 10 October. We would like to thank in advance for their trust those countries that have already given us their valuable support. If elected. Cuba will continue to raise its voice for a universal vision, representative of the South and in favour of the legitimate interests of developing countries, based on a constructive commitment to. and unwavering responsibility for. the full realization of all human rights for all. Cuba will continue to strengthen its democracy and its socialist model, which even under siege has shown how much a developing country — small in size and with modest natural wealth — can do. We will continue our transformative process, seeking ways out of the siege imposed on us by United States imperialism and ways to achieve the prosperity with social justice that our people deserve. In that endeavour, we will never give up the right to defend ourselves.
I wish to conclude by extending an invitation to everyone to work to overcome differences and to face common challenges together and with a sense of urgency. To achieve that, the United Nations and the General Assembly, even with their limitations, are the most powerful instruments at our disposal. Cuba can always be counted on to defend multilateralism and to jointly promote peace and sustainable development for all. It will always be an honour to fight for justice, sharing the difficulties and challenges with the people of the South that are willing to change history. And we will win.