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During a meeting of the Cuban Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Carmelina Ramírez, and the Counsellor, Yoisy Ford, with the ZICUFA leadership, the organization highlighted the role played by the “Henry Reeve” International Medical Brigade throughout these 15 years.

ZICUFA ratified its support for the Cuban Revolution and rejected the intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the current US administration, as well as the defamation campaign against Cuban medical collaboration that provides services to more than 65 countries of the world.

Mr. Secretary General:

Mr. president:

A global epidemic has drastically changed everyday life. From one day to the next, millions are infected and thousands of people die whose life expectancy was higher thanks to development. High-benefit hospital systems have collapsed and the health structures of poor countries suffer from their chronic disability. Drastic quarantines turn the most populous cities into virtual wastelands. Social life does not exist outside of digital networks. Theaters, discos, galleries, even schools, are closed or resized. Our borders have closed, our economies are contracting, our reserves are depleted. Life undergoes a radical redesign of ancestral customs and uncertainty displaces certainty. Even the best friends are unknown under the masks that save us from contagion. Everything changes. As well as the solution to the pandemic, the democratization of this indispensable Organization is urgent, so that it responds effectively to the needs and aspirations of all peoples.

The desired right of humanity to live in peace and security, with justice and freedom, the basis of the union of nations, is constantly threatened. More than 1.9 trillion dollars are wasted today in a senseless arms race based on the aggressive and warmongering policy of imperialism, whose main exponent is the current United States government, responsible for 38 percent of global military spending. We are talking about a markedly aggressive and morally corrupt regime that despises and attacks multilateralism, uses financial blackmail in its relationship with the agencies of the United Nations system and with a never-before-seen arrogance withdraws from the World Health Organization, from UNESCO and the Human Rights Council. Paradoxically, the country that hosts the UN headquarters also departs from fundamental international treaties, such as the Paris Agreement on climate change; repudiates the agreed nuclear agreement with Iran; promotes trade wars; ends its commitment to international instruments of control in the field of disarmament; militarize cyberspace; multiplies coercion and unilateral sanctions against those who do not comply with its designs and it sponsors the forcible overthrow of sovereign governments through unconventional warfare.

In this line of behavior, divorced from the old principles of peaceful coexistence and respect for the right of others to self-determination as guarantor of peace, the government chaired by Donald Trump, in addition, manipulates cooperation in the field of law for subversive purposes. democracy and human rights, while in its own territory, expressions of hatred, racism, police brutality and irregularities in the electoral system and the right to vote of citizens proliferate practically without control. It is urgent to reform the United Nations. This powerful organization, which emerged from the millionaire cost in lives of two world wars and as a result of the universal understanding of the importance of dialogue, negotiation, cooperation and international legality, cannot delay its updating and democratization any longer. Today's world needs as much the UN as the one in which it was born.

Something very special and profound has failed, when there is a daily and permanent violation of the principles of the UN Charter, and when the use or threat of the use of force in international relations is increasingly frequent. There is no way to sustain any longer, as something natural and immovable, an unequal, unjust and undemocratic international order, which puts selfishness before solidarity and the petty interests of a powerful minority over the legitimate aspirations of millions of people. Despite the dissatisfactions and the demands for transformation that, together with other states and millions of world citizens, we ask the United Nations, the Cuban Revolution will always defend the existence of the organization to which we owe the little, but essential multilateralism that survives imperial arrogance. More than once, before this same forum, Cuba has reiterated its willingness to cooperate with the democratization of the UN and with the defense of international cooperation that only it can save. As the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, said, and I quote: “The international community can always count on the sincere voice of Cuba in the face of injustice, inequality, underdevelopment, discrimination and manipulation. ; and for the establishment of a more just and equitable international order, at the center of which the human being, her dignity and well-being are truly located. " End of quote.

Mr. president:

Returning to the seriousness of the current moment, which many attribute only to the COVID-19 pandemic, I consider it essential to warn that its impact far exceeds the health field. Due to its dire consequences, the impressive number of deaths, the damage to the world economy and the deterioration of the levels of social development, the expansion of the epidemic in recent months anguish and despair leaders and citizens of practically all nations. But the multidimensional crisis that it has unleashed clearly demonstrates the profound error of the dehumanized policies imposed at all costs by the dictatorship of the market. Today we are painful witnesses to the disaster to which the irrational and unsustainable system of production and consumption of capitalism has led the world, decades of an unjust international order and the application of a crude and unbridled neoliberalism, which has aggravated inequalities and sacrificed the right to freedom. development of peoples.

Unlike the exclusive neoliberalism, which separates and discards millions of human beings, condemning them to survive on the leftovers of the richest one percent banquet, the COVID 19 virus does not discriminate between one and the other, but its devastating economic impacts and Social policies will be lethal among the most vulnerable, those with the lowest income, the same in the underdeveloped world as in the pockets of poverty of the large industrialized cities.

According to projections by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), to the 690 million people who were hungry in 2019, there could be 130 million as a result of the economic recession caused by the pandemic. Studies by the International Labor Organization (ILO) affirm that more than 305 million jobs have been lost and that more than 1.6 billion workers see their livelihoods threatened.

We cannot address COVID-19, hunger, unemployment, and growing economic and social inequality between individuals and between countries as independent phenomena. It is urgent to implement comprehensive policies in which the human being is the priority, and not economic gains or political advantages. It would be criminal to leave yesterday's and today's decisions for tomorrow. It is imperative to promote solidarity and international cooperation to cushion the blow. Only the United Nations, with its universal membership, has the authority and scope to resume the just fight to eliminate the unpayable foreign debt that, aggravated by the socioeconomic effects of the pandemic, threatens the survival of the peoples of the South.