Excellencies Permanent Representatives, distinguished delegates,
I keep vivid memories of my constant attendance for a decade at the meetings of the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement during my tenure as Permanent Representative to the United Nations. They are cherished memories. I wish to express my profound gratitude for the historic solidarity of the Non-Aligned Movement with the Republic of Cuba since the founding of the Movement.
I would especially like to thank all Permanent Representatives and delegations of Member States of the Non-Aligned Movement at this United Nations headquarters and at other multilateral venues for their invaluable and unwavering solidarity with Cuba. I wish to emphasize that solidarity with Cuba is an integral part of the heritage and tradition reflected in the fundamental documents of the Summits, Ministerial Conferences, and other meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement. I also wish to thank you for your presence in this room, knowing that all of you are extremely busy, not only because of the traditional schedule of the session period, but particularly due to the ministerial debate currently taking place at the Security Council.
In recent months, there has been an escalation of threatening statements by the United States government against Cuba, together with unfounded accusations used as a pretext for the implementation of new coercive and suffocating measures against the Cuban people, such as the Executive Orders of January 29th and May 1st. The recent proclamation on May 1 of an Executive Order significantly escalates the aggression by expanding and qualitatively hardening the extraterritorial nature of the blockade, since for the first time it incorporates the application of secondary sanctions against entities from third countries that operate or have operated with Cuba. The economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba has always been extraterritorial in nature and has always been aggressively enforced against the sovereignty, national interests, companies, businesspeople, and development of all States on the planet.
In particular, the beginning of the acceptance of lawsuits in U.S. courts based on the so-called Helms-Burton Act against companies from third countries seriously aggravated the extraterritorial application of the blockade. But what has just occurred is new. It is unprecedented and extraordinary that, through an Executive Order of the United States government, sanctions are being applied against the interests, businesses, companies, citizens, or even the States that you represent with regard to any of their interests in the United States, even when they have no direct relation whatsoever with Cuba. That is why legal doctrine and the U.S. government itself define them as secondary sanctions.
The growing material and human impact of the extreme enforcement of the economic blockade resulting from the measures imposed this year amounts, in practice, to an almost total siege of the Cuban economy and its disconnection from the international economy as a means to expand and intensify the collective punishment imposed on the Cuban people. At this particularly brutal moment, a siege has been imposed on fuel supplies to our country, including threats of sanctions against third countries, foreign companies, and hostile acts against foreign vessels heading to Cuba. In other words, the energy blockade, the blockade on fuel supplies through an Executive Order, constitutes an act equivalent to the implementation of a total naval blockade, which international law considers an act of war inappropriate in peacetime. It is considered a hostile act, an act of war. The reality is that the United States government, through a set of unilateral coercive measures directed specifically against producers, suppliers, shipping companies, vessels, and tankers, is effectively depriving the country of any hydrocarbon supply. It is well known that Cuba produces less than half of the crude oil it requires to sustain the life of the population and its economy.
Direct hostile acts have been carried out by U.S. military vessels against tankers from third countries flying third-country flags and registrations, which have received threats of boarding or have been boarded and interrogated, generating an intimidating effect against the companies that own them. While the U.S. government adopts measures to suffocate the Cuban economy, it cynically blames the Cuban government for the devastating consequences of this economic war and its impact on the well-being of our people, the exercise of human rights, and the recovery of our economy. It must be said that these extreme measures are today causing serious and increasing humanitarian harm.
This is reflected, for example, in the deterioration of health and nutrition indicators. Cuba’s infant mortality rate, which is a representative indicator of the condition of a population, has increased despite the efforts of our government and the powerful Cuban social and health care system recognized internationally. The rate has doubled. The main issue is not the current absolute rate, which stands at 9.2 deaths per 1,000 live births among children under five years old, but the fact that before the implementation of these extreme measures the rate was 4 per 1,000. This means that newborn Cuban children are dying as a consequence of the extreme tightening of the blockade.
The life expectancy rate of Cuban children diagnosed with cancer has also declined. From a rate of 85%, it is now 65%, meaning that Cuban children suffering from cancer are dying because of the lack of equipment and the most modern pharmaceutical technologies, which are produced only in the United States, or medical devices that have not been within our reach. Someone might think that these rates, compared with global average rates, do not reflect the magnitude of the humanitarian tragedy our people are experiencing today.
But the undeniable fact is the abyss, the gap that has emerged between the normal rates of our people and the current ones, which are not mere statistics but reflect the suffering of a mother who loses a child during or after childbirth, or a family that loses a young child suffering from cancer. They are not statistics, they are not numbers; they are children. Therefore, it is particularly cynical, shameless, and cruel for the United States government to attempt to blame the Cuban government for the humanitarian situation that it has created through its policies against Cuba.
Most importantly, these humanitarian consequences are not what U.S. authorities unacceptably call collateral damage. They are not collateral; they are the very damage that the unprecedented extreme blockade measures currently imposed against Cuba are deliberately designed to cause. In other words, this is a deliberate, profoundly cruel act aimed at creating extreme conditions and depriving the Cuban people of the means necessary for life.
The threats against Cuba are accompanied by conditions referring to internal matters of our country, which strictly pertain to our sovereign prerogatives as an independent State and to our people in the exercise of self-determination. To justify these extreme actions, the United States government fabricates an extensive list of lies, defamatory accusations, and slanders against Cuba, among which stands out the absurd assertion that Cuba constitutes, and I quote, “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. It is ridiculous and defies logic and common sense for the nuclear superpower to classify the small island of Cuba as an unusual and extraordinary threat to its national security.
Cuba in no way constitutes a threat to the security of the United States. Cuba is a peaceful country with a vocation for peace, humanism, and solidarity. Cuba has demonstrated this through a broad record of international solidarity, particularly in the fields of medicine and education.
Cuba is not an enemy of the United States, nor does it intend or wish to be one in any way. There are no foreign military bases in Cuba, no foreign military presence, with the sole exception of the Guantánamo Naval Base, through which the United States illegally usurps Cuban territory, which has historically been claimed by our country. This occupation was imposed through military means many decades ago and persists to this day. It has been a center of torture and a center for the repression of migration, and yet it continues to exist.
Therefore, when speaking of foreign military bases or foreign military personnel, one would simply have to remove the Guantánamo Naval Base to say that there would be absolutely no such presence. Cuba is also a sovereign country with the right to defend itself, and it is preparing for the worst-case scenario of an escalation in U.S. government policy, including military aggression against Cuba that could involve air attacks, bombings, or offensive military actions of some nature. I can tell you that our people and our State will be ready to defend, with arms and to the ultimate consequences, our independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
However, launching a war against Cuba would defy any purpose protected under international law; it would constitute a flagrant violation and provoke extremely serious violations of international humanitarian law. In fact, even without war, such violations are already occurring today. It would seriously damage international, hemispheric, and regional peace and security, destabilize our region, and have harmful consequences for all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly for all interests in the Caribbean Basin, the Gulf of Mexico, and the subregional area where the Cuban archipelago is located.
It would harm the commercial, economic, investment, and other interests of many countries. But in our view, most importantly, it would also harm the American people and the so-called national interest of the United States. It would cause the death of thousands of Cubans, but also of young Americans who would die without a legitimate or just cause, except for defending themselves. They would be sent there as cannon fodder. In the United States, only a small but powerful clique based mainly in Florida could benefit from a conflict with Cuba, seeking revenge against the Cuban people for our decision to remain independent, seeking the return of the country and the Cuban economy to the sphere of U.S. domination, supporting the application of the Monroe Doctrine, which views our region as a backyard and sphere of influence, domination, and exercise of U.S. sovereignty over natural resources that belong to us.
It would also seriously damage the credibility of U.S. foreign policy and the interests of U.S. citizens and Cubans residing here in the United States who firmly oppose a military adventure against Cuba, who oppose their relatives in our homeland suffering harm, and who desire the normalization of bilateral relations, the lifting of the blockade, and a civilized relationship between both countries, as has been demonstrated in numerous studies and sociological surveys.
The main problem is that this government of the United States, as has also occurred in the past, does not recognize Cuba as an independent and sovereign State and perceives it as a domestic matter, particularly as an electoral issue tied to the conditions of internal politics, partisan fluctuations, elections of various kinds, special political and corporate interests, the actions of political action committees, financial fundraising, and political corruption.
Within this dangerous spiral of threats, on May 20, the United States Department of Justice brought a slanderous, deceitful, and infamous accusation against the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, which our people and our State reject and denounce in the strongest possible terms.
The United States government lacks both legitimacy and jurisdiction to carry out this action, which constitutes an act of political provocation, based on absolute and dishonest manipulation and designed to manipulate U.S. and global public opinion in an attempt to secure support for its military escalation against Cuba and its extreme policy toward the Cuban people. Cuba’s response to the violation of its airspace on February 24, 1996, more than 30 years ago, constituted an act of legitimate self-defense, protected under the Charter of the United Nations, the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, and the principles of air sovereignty and proportionality. The inaction of the United States government in the face of Cuba’s multiple formal, private, and public complaints and warnings concerning the more than 25 violations of Cuban airspace involving low-altitude flights over the population of the city of Havana are the facts used as a pretext for this accusation.
At the time, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) clearly established that the downing of those aircraft had occurred within Cuban airspace. I must say that the group responsible for those repeated violations of Cuban airspace had direct links to terrorist actions against our country. These events occurred despite formal guarantees from the then-President of the United States that they would not happen again, and amid the complicity of authorities who permitted the planning, execution, and departure of those flights as part of a set of violent, illegal, and terrorist actions planned and carried out from U.S. territory against the Cuban government and people.
The practice of ensuring impunity and permitting the organization, financing, arming, and deployment of terrorist acts against Cuba from U.S. territory continues to this day, as was demonstrated just a few weeks ago with a terrorist incursion against Cuba that was intercepted in the Corralillo area of our country. I remember with emotion the position assumed by the Non-Aligned Movement, by this Coordinating Bureau. I will never forget that, following my denunciation, the Ambassador of Malaysia, Ambassador Razali, led a broad mobilization within the Coordinating Bureau.
I will never forget the position of the Non-Aligned Caucus in the Security Council, and I will never forget the decisive contribution of this Coordinating Bureau in convening the United Nations General Assembly to hear Cuba’s denunciation. But to this pattern of spurious accusations are now added desperate attempts to construct a fraudulent narrative intended to justify the corrupt and ruthless punishment imposed on the Cuban people, which constitutes a massive, flagrant, and systematic violation of human rights and qualifies under international law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law as collective punishment. It also seeks to justify military aggression against Cuba.
The repeated and dangerous threats of military attack and the ruthless economic aggression currently being carried out by the United States against Cuba threaten not only peace and life in my country, but also the preservation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, proclaimed in 2014 by the Heads of State and Government of all Latin America and the Caribbean under the auspices of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, precisely at the Summit held in Havana. We are facing a colossal effort by the world’s greatest nuclear power aimed at provoking a coldly calculated humanitarian crisis.
In Cuba today there is significant and growing humanitarian harm, but there is no humanitarian crisis. There are no patients without medical care, no people dying in the streets or in hospitals due to lack of electricity, no people dying of hunger. There are great needs, there is suffering, there is profound pain, particularly because of the prolonged hours without electricity, the lack of services, and the high prices of food and basic necessities, but there is no humanitarian crisis. We will have the capacity to prevent one thanks to internal solidarity, thanks to our social organization, thanks to the concept that the human being must be at the center of our governance. There will never be justification or pretexts to establish humanitarian corridors serving only the imperial interests of the United States in controlling maritime or air supplies to Cuba, in violation of freedom of trade and navigation. Nor will there ever be pretexts, nor will our people ever accept humanitarian interventions invoking doctrines such as the responsibility to protect Cuba.
Given the gravity of the recent developments concerning Cuba, I come before the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement to request your solidarity and your decisive action. I come to ask you to intensify your remarkable political and diplomatic efforts to broaden denunciations of the growing hostility of the United States. I come to ask you, through the action of the Non-Aligned Movement, to halt, prevent, and avert military aggression against Cuba and a breach of international peace and security that would entail grave and extraordinary human costs.
I also come to ask the Non-Aligned Movement, its governments, its Heads of State and Government, its Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and the missions of non-aligned countries in multilateral capitals and throughout the world, for their mobilization to prevent military aggression against Cuba and to preserve peace.
I also come to ask the Coordinating Bureau for its mobilization and support so that the United Nations General Assembly fulfills the mandate assigned to it by the Charter of the United Nations and exercises with determination all its important and broad prerogatives, as the most universal and democratic body of this United Nations Organization and as a powerful voice heard throughout the planet, carrying great ethical, political, and legal weight, even though it does not possess coercive or military enforcement mechanisms. I come to ask that the General Assembly stand against this threat of aggression against Cuba and against the energy siege that today is causing extraordinary suffering and hardship to our people; that it mobilize, debate this issue, and pronounce itself on this matter.
Next week we will attentively await the views of the Member States of the Non-Aligned Movement. We stand ready to express our gratitude for your reflections and ideas on what can be done, both by the Movement and by the international community and the General Assembly itself, to avoid escalation. This would be consistent with the tradition of the Non-Aligned Movement throughout its history in defense of peace and always against war, in defense of the rights of peoples, in defense of the human rights of all human beings, and would also continue the important statement issued by the Movement on February 3 of this year condemning the intensification of United States policy against Cuba.
The international community now has, in the case of Cuba, both a responsibility and an opportunity. A responsibility because all States on the planet today are under threat that their independence, sovereignty, and self-determination may be violated. There is not a single State on the planet that does not face threats of coercion and threats of various kinds.
This stems from a supremacist and exceptionalist vision that ignores international law, ignores the United Nations Organization, and under the unacceptable and incredible pretext of peace through strength — a misguided and unacceptable idea — seeks to impose the imperial domination interests of the government, major corporations, and the U.S. military-industrial complex across all latitudes, from those nearest the Equator to those nearest the poles of the planet, across every meridian and every time zone.
The current conduct of the United States government constitutes a growing threat to international peace and security, to independence, sovereignty, national jurisdiction, the rule of domestic law, and the exclusive jurisdiction of the national courts of the States you represent. There is one supreme argument: the defense of peace and the right to life. No political difference, ideological confrontation, historical or current dispute, or reason of any kind could justify bloodshed or military aggression against Cuba.
We firmly believe in the rule of international law and in the peaceful settlement of disputes, and we will remain engaged in talks with the government of the United States despite its inconsistency, lack of seriousness, and the contradiction between what it says and what it does, or in the face of persistent threats expressed through official statements at the highest level, through biased coverage by its powerful technological platforms and media outlets, and through the constant dissemination of slanderous information flooding digital networks.
I wish to state that the international community has the responsibility to stop what is happening on the planet, not only because of the danger of nuclear conflagration or the inexorable advance of climate change threatening the survival of the human species, but also because no one knows when this United States government will launch another war, another invasion, or further actions of plunder, conquest of natural resources, seizure of what it considers strategic enclaves, occupation of territories, or control of trade routes through force or the threat of force. And in the case of Cuba — a small island without weapons of mass destruction, with an internationally recognized record in favor of peace, life, and international solidarity — it has become a symbol, an alternative in the face of what is occurring in the world today.
After the defeat of the United States military aggression at the Bay of Pigs in the 1960s, all peoples became a little freer. I am convinced that broad mobilization and coordination by the international community to prevent military action and the fuel siege against Cuba would contribute to the balance and stability of the planet, to the exercise of rights by all States, and to the national security and national interests of all States, and that this would make the world, despite the extreme circumstances it is currently experiencing, a somewhat better place.
Therefore, I wish to reiterate, on behalf of the President of the Republic of Cuba, our government, and above all the Cuban people, our deepest gratitude for your unwavering and persistent solidarity, and our confidence that our noble and supportive people will continue to count on the defense of universal and sacred ideals and on the solidarity of the Non-Aligned Movement and each of the States and governments that you represent.
Thank you very much.