Speech by Miguel Díaz-Canel, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, at the High Level Meeting during the General Debate of the 76th Ordinary Period of Sessions of the United Nations General Assembly.
Mr. Secretary General;
Mr. president:
The world must watch with shame the poor reach of universal agreements that were once the hope of the excluded and the dispossessed.
Twenty years after the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action, the objectives outlined in those documents to combat all forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and other related intolerance have not been achieved.
Structural racism persists. It is proliferating at worrying levels, including on social media and other communication platforms, hate speech, intolerance, xenophobia and discrimination.
Developed capitalist countries try with demagogic speeches to divert attention from their historical responsibility in the enthronement and persistence of these scourges and their debt to the peoples who are victims of the slavery to which they were subjected. There is a lack of political will from those same countries to deliver on the promises of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action.
The multidimensional crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated structural inequalities and exclusion, typical of the prevailing unjust economic order, which subjects the poor, Afro-descendant or migrant to all kinds of discrimination.
Mr. president:
In Cuba, beyond skin color, African, European and Native American genes are all mixed. We are a single people, Afro-Latino, Caribbean, mestizo, in which several roots merged to forge a unique, vigorous trunk, with its own identity, open to the world from a sense of belonging in which cultural values are assumed from an ethic of solidarity .
With a colonial slave-owning past, the Cuban black and mulatto population suffered for centuries the consequences of a system in which racism and racial discrimination were part of daily life. Only with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 did a process of radical transformations take place that demolished the structural foundations of racism, and eliminated institutionalized racial discrimination forever.
The apology of hatred, the promotion of intolerance and supremacist ideas on the basis of national, religious or ethnic origin and xenophobia are alien to the political, social and economic life of the country.
The new Constitution of the Republic of Cuba ratified and strengthened the recognition and protection of the right to equality, as well as the prohibition of discrimination.
The Magna Carta provides that all people are equal before the law, receive the same protection and treatment from the authorities and enjoy the same rights, freedoms and opportunities; But laws and decrees are not enough to erase centuries of discriminatory practices in societies.
To further advance the emancipatory work of the Revolution, the National Plan against Racism and Racial Discrimination was approved in November 2019, as a government program that encourages the most effective confrontation of racial prejudices and social problems that still persist in our society. .
Cuba's commitment to eradicating racism transcends its borders. Thousands of Cubans supported national liberation movements in Africa and against the shameful apartheid regime. Thousands of others have contributed their solidarity help, in particular, in the area of Health.
We will not give up the purpose of achieving all social justice. The peoples of the world can always count on the contribution of Cuba so that the commitments we made 20 years ago in Durban become a reality.
Thank you.
[1] The Cuban Genetic Map, winner of the Cuban Academy of Sciences 2015, pointed out that on average, without distinction by skin color, genetic miscegenation marked the presence of ancestral European genes in a proportion of 73.8%, 16 , 8% of African origin and 9.4% of genes of Native American origin.