The figurehead “president of Cuba,” Miguel Díaz-Canel, told the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday that his repressive communist state is seeking reelection to the Human Rights Council in the same remarks during which he cited a speech by mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who boasted of using firing squads against dissidents to the same assembly.
Díaz-Canel — who represents all-powerful dictator Raúl Castro, 92, during international engagements — used most of his speech to condemn what he claimed was an “unfair, anachronistic, and dysfunctional” global financing system, lamenting that his country and many other impoverished socialist states were heavily in debt. Díaz-Canel insisted that debt-laden countries were “not asking for handouts or begging for favors” when demanding the institutions they owe money to ease the debt burden.
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Díaz-Canel also repeatedly condemned the United States for choosing not to engage in trade with the repressive communist regime — a state sponsor of terrorism that regularly tortures pro-democracy dissidents, imprisons children for decades at a time if considered “disrespectful” to the Castros, and uses state-sponsored rape and threats of sexual violence against concerned mothers and other women.
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Assembly of the Cuban Resistance
Cuba is currently a member of the Human Rights Council alongside fellow serial international law criminals China, Pakistan, Qatar, and Vietnam, among others, but its term is set to expire at the end of the year.
“Cuba will continue to strengthen its democracy and socialist model which, while under siege, has demonstrated how much a developing country of small dimensions and few natural resources can do,” Díaz-Canel asserted. “We will never give up our right to defend ourselves.”
Díaz-Canel began his remarks by quoting Guevara, one of the key figures of the 1959 communist coup that brought Fidel Castro to power, and noting that Guevara, too, had addressed the General Assembly. Díaz-Canel omitted the content of those remarks in 1964, in which Guevara confirmed, “firing squad executions, yes, we have executed. We execute and we will keep executing so long as it is necessary.”
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Setting the tone by citing Guevara, Díaz-Canel demanded, on behalf of developing countries, “changes that can no longer be postponed in the unjust, irrational, and abusive international economic order.” That order, he continued, “in addition to exclusionary and irrational, is unsustainable for the planet and unviable for the wellbeing of all.”
“It is urgent to establish a new and more just global contract,” he continued. “The efforts of developing countries are not enough to implement the 2030 agenda. They have to be backed with concrete actions to access markets, financing in just and preferential conditions, technology transfers, and north-south cooperation.”
The “concrete actions” he urged included wealthy countries giving billions to poor countries for “underdevelopment” and easing interest rates and other factors in global debt, asking of paying back interest on loans, “what sustainable development can be achieved with that yoke on the neck?”
“We are not asking for handouts or begging for favors,” he insisted.
Díaz-Canel went on to offer a full-throated condemnation of the U.S. sanctions on his regime, implemented in response to a wide variety of human rights atrocities committed by the Castro regime throughout over half a century.
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Assembly of the Cuban Resistance
Sanctions, he claimed, “have become the practice of powerful states who pretend to act as universal judges to weaken and destroy economies and isolate and submit sovereign states.”
“Cuba is not the first sovereign state against which such measures have been launched, but it is the one that has withstood them the longest,” he claimed, blaming the impoverished state of his country — which he does not experience in his daily life — on the “asphyxiating economic blockade” by Washington.
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“There does not exist a single measure or action [by Cuba] to hurt the United States, to hurt its economic sector, its commercial activity, or its social fabric,” Díaz-Canel falsely claimed. “No act of Cuba exists that threatens the independence of the United States, its national security, the exercise of its sovereign rights, interferes in its internal affairs, or affects the wellbeing of its people.”
In reality, Fidel Castro began harming the American people and the national security of their country on January 1, 1959. Mass thefts of property under the guise of socialist “redistribution” resulted in Americans losing property estimated to be valued as high as $7 billion as of 2015. The Castro regime still used much of this property — most notably, ports used for luxury cruise liners following former President Barack Obama’s legalizing of such voyages from America — for profit deep into the 21st century and refuses to pay the victims of its larceny.
Cuba also maintains elaborate espionage efforts in America. Under former President Bill Clinton, in February 1994, one of these operations resulted in the deaths of four Americans: Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales. The Castro regime killed the Americans while legally flying in international waters on a rescue mission to find seaward Cuban refugees with their organization, Brothers to the Rescue. The Castro regime suffered no international repercussions for the slaughter.
More recently, reports this year indicated that Cuba was aiding the genocidal state of China by allowing it to manage espionage activities out of the island. Subsequent reports in July suggested that China may have been operating an intelligence base in Cuba for at least the past three decades.