I am pleased to welcome the Government of
South Sudan as a State Member of the United Nations.
I also join the appeal by all African leaders for an
urgent, effective and international response to the
famine in the Horn of Africa.
While we are engaged in debate here, in Libya
another preventive war is taking place under the
pretext of protecting civilians. The United States and
NATO, supposedly to avoid a massacre, launched a
military attack against a sovereign State without there
being any threat whatsoever to international peace and
security. They unleashed a regime change operation.
NATO imposed on the Security Council a dubious
resolution authorizing
“Member States … acting nationally or through
regional organizations or arrangements … to take
all necessary measures … to protect civilians and
civilian populated areas under threat of attack”
(resolution 1973 (2011), para. 4).
Afterwards, NATO violated this same resolution
in order to supply weapons, provide financing to one
party and deploy operatives and diplomatic personnel
on the ground. Now everybody has a better
understanding of what the concept of responsibility to
protect means and how it can be used. In this war, in
addition to the most advanced and lethal military
technologies, the means of communication have been
used as weapons of war by financial and media
businesses, which are profiteering from the war and the
reconstruction operations, as if they were agents of
crisis containment.
As early as 21 February, Commander-in-Chief
Fidel Castro Ruz warned that NATO was irrevocably
preparing a war against Libya. Since then, Cuba has
engaged indefatigably in the defence not of a
Government but of a principle. It is unacceptable to
assassinate thousands of innocent people under the
dubious purpose of protecting other civilians. History
has eloquently demonstrated that peace cannot be
imposed either by war or by force. It is up to the
Libyan people alone to choose their destiny, without
foreign intervention, in the exercise of their right to
self-determination, independence and sovereignty over
their natural resources and their country’s territorial
integrity.
The military intervention in Libya and the
growing threat against Syria have been the
opportunistic, defensive responses of the United States
and Europe to the collapse of their system of
domination and plunder in North Africa and the Middle
East and to the emergence of genuinely popular
movements in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries, in
order to secure huge reserves of oil and water and to
confiscate financial assets in times of global economic
and social crisis. It is the responsibility of the General
Assembly to exercise its full powers to prevent a
military aggression against Syria. The public should be
have objective information and speak up against war.
President Barack Obama, in his threatening,
deceitful, rhetorical speeches of 20 and 21 September,
described what happened in Libya as a new model. He
said,
“This is how the international community should
work in the twenty-first century. More nations are
assuming the responsibility and the costs of
meeting global challenges. In fact, this is the very
purpose of the United Nations. So every nation
represented here today can take pride in the
innocent lives we saved and in helping Libyans
reclaim their country. It was the right thing to
do.”
A top White House official wrote in Foreign
Affairs magazine that the new United States strategy is
more efficient and less costly. The Bush Administration
strategy considered occupation; the Obama Administration
strategy is that of national liberation. The military
intervention strategy in Libya could also be applied in
other cases.
With absolute cynicism, what is proposed is a
military aggression without casualties or the use of
infantry troops, the costs of which would be mainly
borne by Europe. The destabilization of a country
11-51390 14
through subversion, covert operations and economic
sanctions is described, according to this doctrine, as
the development of a national movement. That new
regime-change operations model shows that current
United States and NATO military doctrines are even
more aggressive than their previous ones, and that the
so called Euro-Atlantic periphery comprises the entire
planet.
No one should doubt that Latin America and the
Caribbean are included in that concept. The
redeployment of the Fourth Fleet, the installation of
American bases, troops and military means to intervene
anywhere in the region, the coup d’état against
Venezuela in 2002, followed by an oil coup, the
sedition in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the military coup in
Honduras and the attempted coup in Ecuador all fit
perfectly in the new strategy.
Can the United States and NATO guarantee today
that the use of force and this concept of regime change
do not apply in the case of Latin American and
Caribbean countries that do not submit to their
interests? Can the European Union say something
about it? What would the United Nations do in such a
situation?
The weakness of the global economy, particularly
the economies of the United States and Europe,
continues to show that the economic crisis that began
in the year 2008 has not yet been overcome. In
developed countries, the terrible burden of its
consequences is borne by workers, the unemployed,
immigrants and the poor, who are brutally repressed
whenever they peacefully defend their rights.
We, the countries of the South, repeatedly
plundered, suffer the distortions of a world economic
order that excludes our legitimate interests. We suffer
under the onerous impact of protectionism and the
steady increase in the prices of foodstuffs and
hydrocarbons. The peoples of many developing
countries are victims of the bankrupt neoliberal
economic model and its sequel of plunder and
exclusion. The social and political consequences are
being felt on all continents.
In the face of a global economic crisis and the
depletion of the planet’s natural resources, what will be
the response of the extremist right-wing forces that are
already in power or may come to power as a result of
the afflictions and hopelessness of voters? In the face
of a growing and universal danger of war, of a new
division of the world and of climate change, could we,
the countries of the South, act together as an essential
condition of our salvation?
In the face of so many serious threats, Latin
America and the Caribbean — the region of Bolívar
and Martí — is coming together, determined to finish
what they left unfinished. It is impossible to divide us
or to turn us against each other. The Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America is a small but
morally powerful group of peoples, and the new
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States is
a fact. The full strength of the Andes will very soon be
expressed in a summit, which will be an epoch-making
event in Caracas — the epicentre of independence in
the Americas, where a Bolivarian people has conquered
power and a continental leader, President Hugo Chávez
Frías, is ever growing.
More than ever, we have to defend the United
Nations, but the biggest challenge will be to turn it into
an organization that serves the legitimate interests of
all States, instead of catering to the arbitrary wishes
and abuses of a few rich and powerful countries. We
must see to it that international law and the purposes
and principles of the United Nations Charter prevail in
the face of the brute force that aims to block them. It is
necessary to re-establish the leading role of the General
Assembly and to recast the Security Council.
The General Assembly has the inescapable moral,
political and legal obligation to ensure the recognition
of an independent Palestinian State, with the
boundaries established before 1967 and with East
Jerusalem as its capital, as a full Member of the United
Nations. This should be accomplished with or without
the Security Council, with or without the veto of the
United States and with or without new peace
negotiations.
If the inalienable right of the Palestinian people
to independence, sovereignty and self-determination is
recognized; if the need to re-establish the exercise of
the human rights of Palestinians is recognized; if the
blockade of Gaza, the economic coercion and
segregation symbolized by the infamous wall are
recognized as crimes; if the subjugation of a nation to
conditions jeopardizing its very existence is described
as genocide; if all Member States are supposed to
adopt all legal measures within their reach to protect
Palestinian civilians, then the General Assembly should
take action now.
15 11-51390
Cuba, a country with a small Jewish community,
condemns the historical injustice of anti-Semitism, the
crime against humanity that was the Holocaust, and
recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist. Our
people harbour only fraternal feelings towards the
Israeli people, who are also victims of this conflict.
Cuba likewise proclaims that the United States
has the moral, political and legal obligation to stop its
continual veto of Security Council resolutions intended
to protect the Palestinian civilians.
The European Union should oppose this veto and
abstain from supporting the empire’s brutal pressure on
members of this Assembly and the Council itself.
Europe should denounce it also because it is certain
that those crimes would not be occurring without the
military supplies, financial support and impunity that
the United States provides to the Government of Israel.
On 11 September 2001, we Cubans shared the
pain of the American people at those atrocious terrorist
acts. We offered selfless solidarity, encouragement and
cooperation. As always, Cuba made crystal-clear
statements against terrorism and against war.
Ten years later, the world is even more insecure,
because instead of turning international consensus
against terrorism into a system of international
cooperation to confront it, the United States invaded
and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, causing the loss of
life of hundreds of thousands of persons and pain to
tens of millions. It was not possible to hide the use of
deception, torture, extrajudicial executions or
assassinations, disappearances of individuals, arbitrary
detentions and the secret renditions and prisons of the
Central Intelligence Agency in Europe and other
regions.
The Government of the United States desecrates
the memory of the victims of 11 September when it
continues the prolonged inhumane imprisonment of the
five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters who were unjustly
condemned, in spurious trials, to sentences of
maximum severity for seeking information about the
terrorist activities of groups that have operated with
absolute impunity from United States territory against
Cuba, leading to the death of or physical harm to 5,577
of our citizens. Once again, with all due respect, I urge
President Obama to make use of his powers to release
them as an act of justice or as a humanitarian gesture,
which would be highly appreciated by their children,
wives, mothers, fathers and all of our people.
The Cuban Government reiterates its interest and
willingness to move towards the normalization of
relations with the United States. Today I reiterate the
proposal to begin a dialogue aimed at solving bilateral
problems, including humanitarian issues, as well as our
offer to negotiate several cooperation agreements
concerning drug-trafficking, terrorism, human
smuggling, natural disasters and protection of the
environment, including in the event of oil spills such as
the one that occurred at the British Petroleum platform
in the Gulf of Mexico.
However, we know that the electoral race has
already begun in this country, while the economic
situation is growing worse.
The economic, commercial and financial
blockade of Cuba has been tightened. The damages it
has caused have totalled $975 billion, based on the
current price of gold. The attempt to subvert the
constitutional order that Cubans have freely elected is
intensifying. There is increasing pressure from the
extreme right and the Cuban-American mafia to
reverse the minimal steps adopted by the American
Government to promote, to some degree, links between
Cuban émigrés and their home country and exchanges
between both peoples.
In Cuba, President Raúl Castro Ruz has reiterated
that we will continue, in our own sovereign way, to
change everything that needs to be changed in order to
make our economy more efficient and our socialism
better, to achieve full justice and to be able to fully
preserve our independence.
As Martí said, “The southern sea will join the sea
of the north and a serpent will hatch from the egg of an
eagle before we cease our struggle to make the
homeland free and prosperous.”