Press release

PRESS RELEASE (Unofficial translation)

• President Joseph Biden issued a statement with the decision of his government, invoking the so-called Magnitsky Law, to apply sanctions that are politically motivated and intentional and totally irrelevant from a practical point of view, against the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Corps General Álvaro López Miera, hero of the Cuban Revolution. General López Miera was a teenager when he joined the struggle in the Sierra Maestra, he is also a hero of the independence of Africa.
• Sanctions were also announced against the National Special Brigade of the Ministry of the Interior, of which our government and our people are deeply proud and which in recent days has acted in strict compliance with the law, with moderation, with respect for the rights of the citizens and with the support of all our people.
• The President of the United States announces that he will continue the sanctions against those responsible for what he calls “repression against the Cuban people”, and that I categorically and absolutely reject.
• In Cuba there has not been an act of repression against the people, in the same way that there has not been a social outbreak, as I have already announced, despite the persistent mendacity of some well-established international press media, particularly in the United States and Spain, and a profusion of slander, manipulation, entanglements, lies and cheap tricks on the digital networks.
• However, thanks to these events, the President of the United States has changed his mind and declared that Cuba is an absolute priority for the Biden-Harris government, the opposite of what his government has been saying consistently, which has been presenting as an excuse to maintain in permanent practical application and legal validity, not only the blockade measures to Cuba that cause so much humanitarian and economic damage, but each of the 243 additional blockade measures applied by the Donald Trump government, including the 55 cruel and opportunistic measures aimed at strangling the Cuban economy, by taking advantage of the dramatic situation that Covid-19 has caused throughout the planet.
• The President of the United States and his government could better deal with the differentiated racial pattern, judicial errors, systemic racism, the brutal repression of social protest in the United States due to the cold murder of Afro-descendant citizens; He could also deal with the situations of more than 400 journalists who suffered injuries or violence when the racial demonstrations occurred in the United States, of them, more than 300 in actions of police brutality.
• The Government of the United States has absolutely no moral authority to ask for the release of people detained in Cuba, it is an act of interference and intervention in internal affairs, it lies when it refers to peaceful protesters, it avoids recognizing that there were violent acts, avoids the denunciations that have been made by our government, first of the persistent instigation of violent acts and acts of terrorism that have been carried out from the territory of the United States, with absolute impunity, in recent years, in particular, in recent months and, very particularly, from June 15 and after July 5, as I have already denounced with copious evidence.
• Neither the President, nor his Secretary of State, nor his National Security advisers in the White House, nor anyone has said anything, daring to refute the accusations I made, or to deny the evidence I presented.
• It is known that the Cuban authorities and in particular the authorities of the internal order, the police authority acted in strict adherence to the law, with absolute respect for the norms that govern their conduct with the minimum of force in the face of vandalism and violent acts that caused injuries to police officers and caused injuries to civilians, to Cuban citizens who either opposed said acts or proclaimed their support for the Revolution and the Cuban Government or faced acts of violence or vandalism that occurred in a limited way, as I said before, in a dozen specific locations on July 11.
• Since then, with the exception of some event such as the one that caused a death in the case of a citizen with a serious criminal record who attacked a police officer, the country has been in absolute calm, the services are working and they have worked last week with complete normality and if you walk through Havana you will be able to testify, and I hope that you will report objectively the conditions of absolute tranquility and usual life of our people in Havana and in the country, despite the adverse conditions and that is why I avoid using the word of complete normality, typical of the pandemic peak of Covid-19 that our country suffers.
• I summon any authority of the US government that supposedly cares about the so-called protesters or any entity from any country that presents a case of a disappeared person, and I promise in a few hours to deny it with sufficient evidence.
• Lists of “missing persons” have been published, here I declare that they are absolutely false and I reject that there is even a single case, in a world in which atrocities are known to occur, in which South American countries have produced thousands and thousands of murders Human Rights defenders, social activists, community leaders, people who joined peace processes or terrible cases of which the United States Government has been very shy in referring to them as the so-called false positives or the killings of civilians to present them as belligerents.
• It is not in Cuba where sophisticated means of repression were used: mechanical equipment, chemical substances, stun explosives, automatic launchers of toxic bombs, that country is not Cuba. It happens every day, however, sometimes even in Europe and very frequently in the United States without much talk in the press about it.
• Secondly, I urge the United States Government and anyone to mention the name of a minor who is detained in Cuba at this time, and I reject the unsustainable slander that there have been loss of life between minors and young people in relation to with these events from last weeks.
• I affirm that the judicial treatment of the cases that were detained is complied with in strict adherence to the Constitution and the substantive and procedural laws of Cuba and with all the guarantees of due process; I report that most of them are at liberty having been fined or under domiciliary precautionary measures in the cases that they have been charged with, or are subject to investigation processes. I strongly reject that there has been a single case of torture and I urge the people who have referred to it to present their name, place and evidence.
• A statement from President Biden and other United States Government officials states that the government is actively collaborating with the private sector in the United States to identify ways that provide secure access to the free flow of information on the Internet. I reject this assertion, I declare that the main obstacle to the connectivity of Cuban citizens on the Internet with digital networks and other telecommunications services is the United States' blockade of Cuba, it is the extreme manipulation of digital networks, it is improper conduct. of the technological platforms and the great emporiums that they make and break and that unfortunately the United States Government controls to a large extent.
• I inform, denounce and demand that the Government of the United States act in the face of the hundreds of computer attacks that have occurred and are occurring against Cuba, with computer means that are based in the territory of the United States and under the sovereignty of that country. and that they occur with total and absolute impunity and I reiterate that our people and our government are gravely concerned, and that the manipulation of information and images that is occurring consistently up to this very moment, should also be due to international authorities.
• I do not know if CNN is present at this press conference, but I can tell you, your company and international public opinión, that CNN en español carries out a systematic and mendacious manipulation that violates its own rules, which is far from elementary standards of informative essence and of truthful, objective journalism and disrespects the right of Americans and the citizens of the world to receive free and truthful information.
• In the same way that the US channel FOX has continued to manipulate images even in motion, manipulating video with high technology, because you know that it is not easy in a video to remove text from posters or apply technology to make it look like demonstrations in support of the Cuban Revolution, to our people and to our government, as acts of opposition. I reiterate that the Cuban Government will continue, as the President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has repeatedly declared, attending to the aspects of the Cuban reality that concurred in these situations.
• I am a witness to the vigilance and the dedication of the government in the attention to the difficulties, deficiencies, deprivations, anxiety and the problems generated in our population by the shortage, the shortage of medicines and the difficult conditions that we are living in these days due to coincidence of factors like the brutally intensified blockade and during the pandemic by the United States Government, with the factors of the international economic recession, in our case the fall in tourism and the enormous expenses to which the country has forced treatment and prevention of the Covid-19 pandemic.
• In his first statement, President Biden attributed complex social conditions in Cuba to Covid and the government's management of the pandemic, which I categorically denied. The mass graves are on Hart Island, in the United States, they are not in Cuba; the deaths in the streets were in the United States, on which the North American government never campaigned or called for humanitarian aid, nor did it consider it a reason for instability, occurred in dozens of cities in South America and occurs today in much of the planet.
• The Government of the United States knows that the COVAX mechanism was impossible for Cuba, firstly because of the limited coverage of just committing to guaranteeing 20 percent; secondly, due to the financing required, vaccines in the COVAX mechanism are expensive; thirdly, because the mechanism has failed miserably to supply vaccines that were paid for and contracted, as has happened with the transnationals that have enriched themselves in a vile way at the expense of the pandemic and that daily fail to comply with delivery commitments and that include clauses draconian in contracts to avoid date compromises.
• It is known that the fatality rate from Covid in Cuba is well below the fatality rate in the world and that of more than 60 countries, and it is known that the rate of cases in Cuba is well below international standards. It is really sad that U.S is the country that has more than 600 thousand deaths, approximately half of which could have been avoided with policies other than that of the previous government of the United States, and that today suffers a pandemic peak also in states especially Republican government like Florida itself.
• The President of the United States has unusually referred to the issue of remittances in an erratic way, one day he announced that remittances could not be restored, another day he announced that a working group had been created to study the issue and today he says that it is complex and requires a measured and thoughtful approach in coordination with experts. Why? I ask him.
• It is known that tens and tens of billions in remittances are sent from the United States to a lot of countries in the world, in particular to countries in Latin America. He says that the objective is to ensure that the funds reach the Cuban people, without a part of the income being diverted by the “regime”, as he calls it. It was not the "regime" but his predecessor government that imposed in September 2019 an unfounded and cruel limit of 1000 dollars per quarter to family remittances, it was the one that suspended non-family remittances, that is, those that are by donation, it was the one that in February 2020 established a regulation that eliminated the possibility that Western Union company sends remittances to Cuba from third countries.
• It was the US government that in July 2020 established regulations that prevent the forwarding of remittances from the United States to various companies from CubaMax, VaCuba, and that were suddenly suspended just hours after they began. It was the Government of the United States that in September 2020 announced the incorporation of AIS, which is a subsidiary of the FINCIMEX company, to the restricted list of Cuban entities.
• It was the Government of President Trump that in October 2020, modified the regulations to prevent persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, that is, legal entities, individuals, financial companies, remittance processing companies, from processing remittances from and towards Cuba that include entities that the United States government has capriciously and arbitrarily included in the so-called list of restricted Cuban entities.
• By virtue of these measures, in practice the sending of remittances to our country was cut off, but the spokesmen of the United States Government lie shamelessly when they say that the Cuban Government appropriates part of the remittances. I urge them to explain what they mean or to present minimal evidence.
• Remittances are not taxed, there are no taxes, there are no duties on remittances; The one who sets a service commission is not the Cuban Government, it is not any Cuban company, it is the Western Union company.
• The Government of the United States lies supinely and slanders, so I invite the Government of the United States to carry out the review that it says it does, because if it wanted to address any humanitarian concern in Cuba, it should start with the measures of Trump and the blockade itself that concern the pandemic.
• But the issue of remittances is a family, personal matter for citizens and one cannot imagine what the technical complexity is, which does not really exist, but what there is is political manipulation, and attempts to use remittances as a political weapon, as a political conditioner, kidnap the remittances and harm the people who send the remittances and harm the Cuban families that receive them here.
• The President assures that he will continue to listen to the opinions of Cuban-American leaders. It is public that there have been meetings in this regard. He would do well to listen to the opinion of Cubans living in the United States who he discriminates against and harms with the restrictions of the blockade, in particular, that of remittances.
• It would be good for him to listen, also, as a democratic president would, to his constituents who voted for him on the basis of a platform that includes these issues.
• Given the failure of the attempt to generate instability and damage the constitutional order, and accentuate the humanitarian damage and our economy of the political campaign, basically in digital networks, which began on June 15 and lasts until this minute, the government of The United States tries to divert attention to absolutely unsustainable accusations and accusations to divert attention from the evident failure, to disguise its direct responsibility to prevent and punish the computer attacks that are taking place against Cuba, in its responsibility to prevent it from continuing incitement to violence and terrorism, from media mainly based in Florida against our country.
• The Government of President Biden and the President himself have also referred, unusually, to what they have called serious health damages to US diplomats in Cuba, which is frankly surprising, because there have already been four years of investigation by government agencies. US law enforcement that has consistently told their Cuban counterparts that they have not found a single piece of evidence of a deliberate act against any US diplomat, nor do they have the slightest explanation for the health signs and symptoms that they reported at the time.
• It has been four years in which eminent American scientists, from North America, from different parts of the world, have demonstrated convincingly that the nonsense of concussion or brain damage without concussion exists, or the fairy tale of an indeterminate flow of energy that it violates all the laws of Newtonian and modern physics and is known to be an outright lie.
• I reiterate to the Government of President Biden, to Secretary Blinken, to whom I acknowledge that it was not they who were behind these events, to at least acknowledge that they have found absolutely no reason and that the proliferation of alleged incidents of health that occur in all latitudes of the planet, and curiously also in the city of Washington, in the month of November 2020, and even more curiously on the premises of the White House itself.
• So if what the United States Government is looking for is a pretext to do something that it should have done a long time ago, which is to reestablish consular services to Cubans from its consulate in Havana, it is difficult for them to obtain forgiveness from the right wing radical extremist from Miami, from the anti-Cuban extreme right for making these pronouncements.
• It is a violation of rights that damages family reunification, the fact that a Cuban who wishes to visit his family in the United States, or who wishes to emigrate to the United States, has to pay exorbitant prices to go to the Georgetown consulate, which costs thousands and thousands of dollars, he is forbidden to present health documents from Cuban institutions, that he has to stay in place for long weeks and has to travel twice. Forcing a Cuban who wishes to visit a relative in the United States to go to a third country amid the current difficult international flight conditions is cruel to say the least.
• I have denounced since June 23 that the government of the United States acts irresponsibly in relation to migration issues, under political motivation and that it will be its responsibility if this continues to cost lives or if it causes irregular and disorderly flows from Cuba to the United States.
• To a senator from Florida who constantly instigates saying that it is the purpose of the Cuban government to launch a wave of immigration to the United States, I suggest that you ask your president, inform yourself better and stop those silly accusations.
• I reiterate that the Government of the United States persists until this minute with a barrage of statements and accusations in an act of gross interference aimed at altering the constitutional order in violation of International Law and our laws.

Permanent Mission of Cuba