Statement by the Irish Chapter of The Network in Defence of Humanity
END THE US BLOCKADE OF CUBA! REMOVE CUBA FROM THE LIST OF STATE SPONSORS OF TERROR!
10/06/2024 On 8 June 2024 in Belfast, members of the Irish Chapter of The Network in Defence of Humanity (La Red en Defensa de la Humanidad) were honoured and delighted to meet with Rigoberto Zarza Ross, Europe Director of ICAP, El Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (The Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples). As an organisation, ICAP distils the best of Cuba’s revolutionary internationalism, solidarity, humanitarianism, and grassroots activism and people power. We offer our utmost respect, admiration and support for ICAP, and for the Cuban Revolution and Cuban people.
Rigoberto briefed us thoroughly on the ongoing impact of the cruel, illegal and unjust US blockade against Cuba, and on the further disruption, misery and suffering caused directly by the cynical, baseless and deranged decision by the US to list Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.
We call for an immediate end to the blockade more widely, and specifically for the removal of Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism listing. We call upon all political parties, social organizations, trade unions, and influential figures and groupings in civil society in Ireland to join forces and to ensure that we play a leading role internationally in opposing the blockade and the concomitant listing of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. We must undertake this collectively as a matter of urgency, given the desperate impact upon the civilian population of Cuba by the coercive measures inflicted by the US.
The listing of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism is a particularly egregious distortion of reality and truth: not only because of the widely respected role Cuba plays in upholding international law, peace and cooperation but also because of the state terror unleashed by US imperialism across the world, which has been murderously directed against Cuba for over six decades. In the violent campaign against Cuba, over 3500 people have been murdered by terrorism funded by, assisted by, sponsored or endorsed by the US, including the 1976 attack on a civilian airplane that killed 78 men, women and children, the bombing of hotels and other indiscriminate acts of slaughter. It is a sick joke that the US seeks to claim the moral authority to decide what constitutes terrorism. It is the perpetrator seeking to masquerade as the victim, the violator of international law pretending to be its defender.
One of the fundamental reasons why there are so many members of the ‘global Irish’, so many millions in the US, and across the world who are part of that diaspora, is the cataclysmic impact of British imperialism upon Ireland. In particular, An Gorta Mór (1845-1852), or The Great Hunger, combined colonial racism with liberal economics to use starvation as a weapon of imperialist warfare: millions were killed or starved into exile, and whole communities and cultures, ways of living and belonging, and indeed a national language, were ruptured and fragmented.
Such burdensome historical experience, such painful political memory should ensure that Ireland is always, implacably, irresistibly, on the side of the vanquished, the colonized, and the dispossessed. The attempt by the US government to position itself as a bearer of freedom and human rights, given the murderous impact of its imperialist blockade of Cuba, is an obscene falsification of reality.
We call upon all anti-imperialists to show solidarity with Cuba, to call out the preposterous slander sullying Cuba’s name with terror, and to oppose this vile blockade to the hilt. Ireland itself has its own historical experience of an empire just off its shores that used hunger as a weapon of war. In terms of the historical experience of our own people and the lessons that should be learned from that history, we have a historical debt and obligation to humanity to condemn this oppression wherever it occurs. This malign interference in the lives of Cuban people, including the denial of their right to life, must be ended forever, and we in Ireland must play our part.
We affirm the words of the great Cuban revolutionary, José Martí: patria es humanidad! Our homeland is humanity, and we stand in solidarity with the Cuban people.
The Board of REDH Ireland.