Cuba, 1999

In this

Hall today are representatives of wealthy countries and also

representatives of poor countries, who constitute the

majority. There are ministers and ambassadors from

countries whose per capita gross domestic product is

$25,000 dollars, and others who represent countries where

that figure is a mere $300 dollars. Moreover, that difference

grows year by year.

There are representatives of countries that appear to

have a promising future. These are the countries with only

20 per cent of the world's population, but 86 per cent of its

gross domestic product, 82 per cent of world export

markets, 68 per cent of direct foreign investment, and 74

per cent of all of the telephone lines on the planet.

What can we say about the future of those whom we

represent here who account for 80 per cent of the world's

population, living in countries that were colonized and

plundered for centuries to increase the wealth of the former

metropolises? It is true that time has passed, and that our

history is what it is and not what we might have wished it

to be. But must we simply resign ourselves to a future that

is essentially the same?

Can we feel reassured knowing that the wealth of the

three richest people in the world is greater than the

combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed

countries, with their population of 600 million, whose

representatives are present in this hall today demanding

justice?

In this hall today we have representatives of countries

where most of the population — which is hardly growing

at all — are guaranteed decent living standards and where

some live in opulence. These populations spend $12 billion

on perfume and $17 billion on pet food every year.

But there is a majority represented in this hall that has

no reason to feel optimistic. This majority comprises 900

million people who go hungry and 1.3 billion who live in

poverty. My brothers and sisters here today representing

Africa have no reason to feel reassured. They know that

today there are 23 million people on their continent who are

HIV-positive. They also know that it costs $12,000 to treat

just one person infected with the virus, which means that it

would take almost $300 billion a year for all the AIDS

patients in Africa to receive the same treatment currently

provided to AIDS sufferers in wealthy countries.

Could my colleagues representing 6 billion of the

planet's inhabitants — to which a further 80 million are

added every year, almost all of them in the Third

World — really think that a situation like this could

continue unchanged into the next century?

How can any of us prevent the continued growth in

the number of emigrants from poor nations who flock to

the wealthy countries in pursuit of a dream, while the

current world order does not allow them to find the

conditions for a decent life in their own countries?

A small number of representatives in this hall

represent countries that have no need to fear a military

threat in the coming century. Some even have nuclear

weapons, belong to a powerful alliance or build up their

armies every year with better, more sophisticated

weapons. They are the ones who view the rest of the

world as merely the Euro-Atlantic periphery of the North

Atlantic Treaty Organization, and therefore they will

never have to endure the devastation of massive bombings

by invisible attackers acting under what has come to be

known as a new strategic concept of that aggressive

military organization.

But the vast majority of those of us gathered here

today do not enjoy such security. We are troubled to see

that in a world dominated by a single military and

technological Power, we are today less safe than during

the difficult years of the cold war.

If one day we wished to call upon the Security

Council to discuss a situation that we viewed as a threat

to one of our poor countries, does the Assembly think

that we would be heard? I fear that recent examples have

proved otherwise.

Why is there no discussion in the Assembly about

general and complete disarmament, including nuclear

disarmament? Why is the issue limited to controlling

small arms, which are necessary in a case such as that of

Cuba — a country attacked and under blockade for 40

years? Why is there no mention of the deadly laser-

guided bombs, the depleted uranium missiles, or the

cluster or graphite bombs used indiscriminately by the

United States in bombing the civilian populations in

Kosovo?

Could anyone claim that our children will inherit a

just and secure world if we do not change the unfair and

unequal standards that are currently used to measure

issues of such key importance to our collective security?

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Must we also accept the imposition of free market

rules and the sacred law of supply and demand in the brutal

commerce of death? What is stopping the international

community from attempting, in a rational and coordinated

manner, to redirect a large part of the $780 billion currently

used for military expenditures to promoting development in

the Third World countries?

That is why we so passionately defend respect for the

principles of international law, which have guided relations

among all of the world's countries for more than half a

century. What would we have left to defend ourselves in

the future if we poor countries were no longer able to rely

on such principles as respect for sovereignty and self-

determination, the sovereign equality of all States and non-

interference in the internal affairs of other nations? How

could we call on the international community to protest a

threat against one of our countries if those principles, which

are today systematically and flagrantly violated, were to be

struck from the Charter of the United Nations?

In a unipolar world, attempts to impose notions such

as the limitation of sovereignty, and humanitarian

intervention, do not advance international security: they

pose a threat to the countries of the Third World, which

have neither powerful armies nor nuclear weapons. Such

attempts must therefore be brought to an end: they violate

the letter and the spirit of the Charter.

At the same time, we believe it is necessary to defend

the United Nations, now more than ever. We defend the

need for its existence as much as we do the need to

democratize it. The challenge facing us is that of reforming

the United Nations so that it serves the interests of all

nations equally. We defend both the need for the existence

of the Security Council and the need to make it more

inclusive, democratic and transparent. Why not expand the

number of permanent members? Why could not the Council

include at least two or three new permanent members from

Latin America, Africa and Asia? The membership now is

three times the number of countries which founded the

United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and the vast

majority of them — the Third World countries — do not

have a single permanent member to represent them.

However, we do not defend the right of veto. We do

not believe that anyone should have it. But if it is not

possible to eliminate it, we should at least attempt to ensure

that this prerogative is more evenly shared, and provide that

all new permanent members have the right of veto. Why,

if the right of veto cannot be eliminated now, is it not

restricted to votes on proposed measures under Chapter VII

of the Charter? As things stand at present, a single

country can override the will of all the other United

Nations Members. And there is one country that has

exercised its unlimited right to veto an infinite number of

times: the United States. This is untenable.

At the United Nations, we must curb the attempt to

impose a single way of thinking on us by trying to make

us believe that it is our way, or that it is superior to our

rich diversity of cultures and models, or that it is more

advanced and modern than our multiplicity of identities.

To survive, we must resist being treated as merely the

Euro-Atlantic periphery and oppose having labelled as

global threats the problems that we face as consequences

of colonialism: underdevelopment; the consumerism of

the wealthy countries; and even the results of their recent

or current policies.

Here in this Hall are the representatives of the Group

of 7, whose countries have 685 million inhabitants and

economies with a combined gross domestic product of

$20 trillion. Also present are the rest of us, who represent

the remaining 181 countries, with more than 5 billion

inhabitants and economies with a combined gross

domestic product of barely $10 trillion. Yes, we are all

equal under the Charter of the United Nations, but not in

real life.

While rich countries have the transnational

corporations that control over one third of all of the

world's exports, we poor countries have the asphyxiating

burden of external debt, which has risen to the level of $2

trillion and continues to grow, devouring almost 25 per

cent of our export earnings just to service our debt. How

can development be possible under these conditions?

While we speak insistently in this Hall of the need for a

new international financial architecture, our countries are

being buffeted by the scourge of a system that allows the

daily occurrence of speculative transactions worth $3

trillion. That structure cannot be fixed; it is not a matter

of remodelling it, but rather of demolishing it and

rebuilding it anew.

Can anyone explain the logic of this phantom

economy that produces nothing and is sustained by

buying and selling things that do not exist? Should we or

should we not demolish this chaotic financial system and

build upon its ruins a system that favours production,

takes differences into account and stops forcing our

battered economies to endlessly pursue the impossible

illusion of increasing financial reserves? Sooner or later,

those reserves evaporate in the course of the desperate

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and unfair battle to defend our currencies from the strong

and highly favoured currency of the anachronistic Bretton

Woods accord, the sacrosanct dollar.

When the history of these years is written, it will be

very difficult to explain how a single country was able to

accumulate so many privileges and such absolute power.

What will the economists of the next century say when they

realize that the United States was able to live with a current

account deficit that is already about $300 billion without

the International Monetary Fund (IMF) having imposed

even one of the severe adjustment programmes that are

impoverishing the countries of the third world?

Who will explain the fact that, thanks to the privilege

of having the world's reserve currency, the Americans, save

less and spend more than anyone else in the world? Will

anyone tell them that in 1998 they were able to import

$124 billion worth of cars and spend $8 billion in

cosmetics, thanks in good measure to the fact that they

controlled 17.8 per cent of the votes of the International

Monetary Fund, which gives them a virtual right of veto?

How can we explain to the people of Tanzania, for

example, that while all of this was happening they had to

spend nine times as much on servicing the foreign debt

than on primary health care, and four times as much as on

primary education?

The current international economic system is not only

profoundly unjust, but also absolutely unsustainable. An

economic system that destroys the environment cannot be

sustained. The world's supply of drinking water today is 60

per cent of what it was in 1970; and today there are 2.3

billion more human beings on the planet than there were

back then. The same is happening with our forests. Could

anyone in this Hall defend the proposition that such a pace

of destruction can go on indefinitely?

An economic system based on the irrational

consumption patterns of the rich countries, which are later

exported to our own countries through the mass media,

cannot be sustained. Why not accept that it is possible to

provide a decent life to all the people of the planet with the

resources that are within our reach and the degree of

technological development we have achieved, through a

rational and solidarity-based exploitation of all this

potential?

How will they explain that the member countries of

the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and

Development, whose representatives I now address with all

due respect, have fallen so far behind as to provide less

than one third of their 1970 commitment to dedicate a

minimum of 0.7 per cent of their gross national product

to official development assistance?

I asked a member of our delegation, a Deputy in our

National Assembly and a professed Christian, what the

Bible would say about such an unjust economic order. He

responded quickly with the words of a Prophet from the

Holy Book:

“Woe unto them that decree unrighteous

decrees, and that write grievousness which they have

prescribed;

To turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take

away the right from the poor of my people, that

widows may be their prey, and that they may rob

the fatherless!

And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in

the desolation which shall come from afar? to whom

will ye flee for help? and where will ye leave your

glory?” (The Holy Bible, Isaiah 10: 1-3)

I know that many people in this Hall share these

concerns, and I also know that almost all of us are asking

ourselves the same question. Can the World Trade

Organization (WTO) be spared from becoming a fiefdom

of the United States and its allies, as the International

Monetary Fund and the World Bank are today? Will we

truly succeed in making the World Trade Organization the

democratic and transparent forum we need, or will the

powerful interests of a minority be imposed to the

detriment of the silent majority, which is too divided,

confused and unsuspecting to understand the dangers of

a cold and dogmatic liberalization of world trade? Will

they remember that the vast majority of third world

countries, dependent on the export of a single agricultural

product or a few spices, will be wiped out of world trade

and crushed by the fierce competition of a few

transnational corporations? Should we or should we not

take these realities into account and accept the need to

protect the interests of the underdeveloped countries, if

only to guarantee their very survival?

How will we poor countries be able to compete if

our professionals leave for the wealthy nations in pursuit

of better opportunities; if we are not even allowed to keep

our athletes and we must watch with sorrow as they

compete under another country's flag? How will we poor

nations be able to compete economically if the 10 most

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developed countries control 95 per cent of the patents

issued in the last 20 years, and intellectual property, far

from being liberalized, is ever more closely protected?

Talking to us poor countries about trade through the

Internet is almost a joke, when we know that 91 per cent of

Internet users live in the member countries of the

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Will we ever see a change in the current situation, in which

there are over 600 telephone lines for every 1,000 people

in the United States, Sweden and Switzerland, yet only 1

telephone per 1,000 people in Cambodia, Chad and

Afghanistan?

As part of this tragic depiction of the situation facing

the vast majority of countries in the world, I feel bound to

talk about my own country. The situation in Cuba is an

eloquent example, if ever there was one, of what should not

be done in terms of relations between powerful and small

nations.

For more than 40 years, my people have been

subjected to a brutal policy of hostility and all kinds of

aggression imposed by the United States. High-level

authorities in that country have openly admitted that this

policy is aimed at destroying the political and economic

system built by the Cuban people of their own free will and

at restoring the neo-colonial power that the United States

held over Cuba and definitively lost on 1 January 1959,

with the triumph of the Cuban revolution.

As has been made clear by events, public statements

by American spokespersons and by declassified secret

United States documents, this policy of aggression has been

carried out through means that have ranged from political

and diplomatic measures, propaganda campaigns, espionage

and subversion, and fostering defection and illegal

emigration, to acts of terrorism, sabotage and biological

warfare. This policy has also included the organization and

support of armed groups; air and naval raids against our

territory; the hatching of over 600 plots to assassinate the

leader of our revolution; a military invasion by a mercenary

army; the most serious threat ever of a global nuclear

conflict, in October 1962; and finally, a brutal commercial

and financial blockade and a ferocious economic war

against my country that have now lasted 40 years.

Let me set aside the economic aspects of this

aggression against Cuba and deal solely with the physical

aggression and acts of war carried out by the United States

Government. Recently Cuban social organizations, on

behalf of the entire population of Cuba, filed a civil lawsuit

against the United States Administration claiming

reparation and compensation for loss and damages

resulting from the deaths of 3,478 Cuban citizens and for

a further 2,099 survivors who have been left disabled as

a consequence of the covert plots and the “dirty war”

waged by the United States. The suit demands that the

United States Government, which is responsible for these

human losses and injuries, be sentenced to pay a total of

$181.1 billion in reparation as a minimum symbolic

compensation for the loss of something that is clearly

irreplaceable and priceless: the lives and physical well-

being of the more than 5,500 Cuban citizens who have

been victims of the United States' obsessive policy against

Cuba.

At the open and public trial, televised nationwide, at

which this claim was considered, it was clearly proved

that the United States Government was directly

responsible for this continued aggression, and that the

undeclared war against Cuba had constituted an official

State policy enforced by no fewer than nine successive

United States Administrations over the last 40 years.

What will they tell their grandchildren, these leaders,

officials and agents of the United States Government

whose consciences are weighed down by the guilt of

planning and carrying out this “dirty war” against Cuba

and by the moral burden of responsibility for the death of

thousands of Cubans?

Can we possibly allow an international system to

continue into the next century that accords total impunity

for monstrous actions such as these, which have been

systematically and flagrantly perpetrated by a major

Power?

The ferocious economic blockade that extends to

every facet of our country's foreign trade and financial

relations merits particular attention. This blockade, which

has lasted over 40 years, began to develop before the

triumph of the revolution. A secret United States

document, declassified in 1991, reveals that on 23

December 1958, at a National Security Council meeting

attended by President Dwight Eisenhower at which the

situation in Cuba was discussed, the then-Director of the

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Allen Dulles,

categorically stated: “We must prevent a Castro victory”.

Three days later, on 26 December, President

Eisenhower instructed the CIA that he did not wish the

specifics of covert operations against Cuba to be

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presented to the National Security Council. Everything had

to be kept strictly secret.

The sudden and overwhelming triumph of the

revolutionary forces six days later did not give them time

to prevent a Castro victory. The first United States assault

on the national economy took place on 1 January 1959,

when those who had looted the public treasury fled for the

United States, together with the perpetrators of the worst

massacres and abuses against the Cuban people.

Five weeks after the triumph of the revolution,

economist Felipe Pazos, a professional man — well known

and respected in United States Government circles — who

had been appointed by the revolutionary Government to

take over the management of the Cuban National Bank,

announced on 6 February that the former regime had

embezzled or seized $424 million from the gold and dollar

reserves that backed the Cuban peso. The New York Times

subsequently corroborated the report's claim concerning the

theft of the funds, which constituted the country's only

reserves.

The spoils of this colossal theft ended up in United

States banks. Not a dime was returned to Cuba. The

National Bank immediately requested a modest quantity of

funds to deal with this highly critical situation. That request

was turned down.

The Agrarian Reform Act, enacted on 17 May 1959,

was aimed at providing food for the vast majority of our

undernourished people and direct or indirect employment

for the large percentage of the population that was then

unemployed. It was enacted when the word socialism had

not yet been spoken in Cuba; however, it provoked an

extreme reaction in the United States, whose companies

owned much of the best and most fertile land in Cuba.

Cuba's willingness, stipulated in the Act itself, to provide

the owners with deferred compensation paid out in

reasonable and workable instalments was met with an

immediate demand from the United States Government for

prompt, effective and full cash compensation. There was

nothing in the public coffers with which to meet this

demand.

A month later, on 24 June, at a meeting called by the

State Department to consider options for action against

Cuba, the view was put forth that the United States should

take a very strong stance forthwith against the Act and its

implementation, and that the best way to achieve the

necessary results was through economic pressure. The

elimination of the Cuban sugar cane quota from the United

States market was proposed. According to a declassified

document, this would cause the sugar industry to suffer

an abrupt and immediate decline, causing widespread

higher unemployment; the large numbers of people

thereby forced out of work would begin to go hungry. At

that same meeting, Secretary of State Herter explicitly

described these proposals as measures of economic

warfare.

In a memorandum dated 6 April 1960, Mr. L. D.

Mallory, a senior State Department official, stated that:

“The only foreseeable means of alienating internal

support is through disenchantment and disaffection

based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship ...

every possible means should be undertaken promptly

to weaken the economic life of Cuba”.

He suggested taking:

“... a line of action which ... makes the greatest

inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to

decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about

hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the

Government.”

On 6 July of that same year, the United States

adopted one of the measures proposed: the elimination of

the Cuban sugar quota. Never again would the United

States buy a single pound of sugar from Cuba. A market

that was established over the course of more than 100

years between the United States and Cuba, with Cuba

guaranteeing the supply of this essential food product to

the United States and its allies during the first half of the

century, including during the two World Wars from which

the United States emerged as the wealthiest, most

powerful nation in the world, was wiped out in a second,

dealing a cruel blow to the country's major source of

employment and wealth and depriving it of essential

funds for the food, medicine, fuel and raw materials

needed to ensure the material survival of our people.

From that time on, successive economic measures

against the Cuban people continued to accumulate until

they formed a absolute and total blockade, which went so

far as to prevent Cuba from importing even an aspirin

produced in the United States, or from exporting to that

country a single flower grown in Cuba.

This complete blockade, cynically referred to in

official terminology with the euphemistic and apparently

innocuous word “embargo”, has continued to intensify

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over the past 40 years. At the most critical and difficult

time in our history, when the Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics and the socialist bloc collapsed, and with them

the basic markets and sources of supply that the country

could count on to withstand the ferocious economic warfare

waged against an island only 90 miles from the United

States coast, they decided to be yet more unyielding in their

approach to Cuba: with truly vulgar and repugnant

opportunism, the blockade was intensified to the maximum.

The so-called Torricelli Act of 1992, among other

restrictive measures that greatly affected the maritime

transport of food and other commodities between Cuba and

the rest of the world, prohibited United States subsidiaries

based in third countries from trading with Cuba. This put

an end to commercial operations that amounted to over

$700 million in imports of foodstuffs and medicines from

those countries. This genocidal policy reached even more

infamous heights with the Helms-Burton Act, which

codified all previous administrative restrictions, expanded

and tightened the blockade and established it in perpetuity.

Subsequent to the passage of that law, and with the

aim of tightening even further the blockade against the

Cuban people, numerous amendments, introduced into bills

of such urgency and length that many United States

lawmakers did not even have time to read them, were

adopted by show of hands in the United States Congress.

The Cuban-American terrorist mafia, which is closely

linked to the extreme right wing, has achieved its goal of

changing the blockade from an order from the executive

into rigorous and inflexible legislation. The genocide

thereby became institutionalized.

Following a 1997 study of the consequences of the

blockade for health, the American Association for World

Health concluded that it violates the most basic

international agreements and conventions governing human

rights standards, including the United Nations Charter, the

Charter of the Organization of American States and the

Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian

Persons in time of War. The Geneva Conventions, to which

some 165 countries, including the United States, are parties,

require the free passage of all medical supplies and

foodstuffs intended for civilian use in time of war. The

United States and Cuba are not at war. Indeed, their

Governments have even maintain diplomatic representation

in Havana and Washington. However, the American

Association for World Health has determined that the

embargo's restrictions are a deliberate blockade of the

Cuban population's access to food and medicine in

peacetime.

In the same report, the American Association for

World Health expresses its belief that the United States

embargo against Cuba has dramatically harmed the health

and nutrition of a large number of ordinary Cuban

citizens and concludes that the embargo has significantly

increased suffering in Cuba, to the point of causing death.

For seven consecutive years, the Assembly has

consistently adopted a resolution on the need to end the

economic blockade imposed by the Government of the

United States of America on the Cuban people. The

condemnation of that genocidal policy has visibly grown

from year to year: year on year between 1992 and 1998,

the Cuban resolution against the blockade received 59, 88,

101, 117, 137, 143 and 157 votes in favour, while the

United States obtained only 3, 4, 2, 3, 3, 3 and 2 votes,

including its own. Given the absolute contempt

demonstrated by the United States with regard to these

General Assembly resolutions, the people of Cuba have

decided, independently of the battle taking place in this

Assembly, to resort to the legal procedures to which they

are entitled in order to demand the appropriate sanctions

against those responsible for such acts of genocide.

Cuba's initiative is based on a solid and irrefutable

legal foundation. The Convention on the Prevention and

Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the

Assembly on 9 December 1948 and signed by the

Government of the United States of America on 11

December 1948 and by the Republic of Cuba on 28

December 1949. It entered into force on 12 January 1951

and has been signed and ratified by 124 States. Article II

of that Convention reads:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of

the following acts committed with intent to destroy,

in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or

religious group”.

In subparagraph (c), it immediately goes on to

include, among these acts,

“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions

of life calculated to bring about its physical

destruction in whole or in part”.

Article III stipulates that the following acts, among

others, shall be punishable: “(a) Genocide; ... (d) Attempt

to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide”. It

explicitly states in article IV that

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“Persons committing genocide or any of the other

acts enumerated in article III shall be punished,

whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers,

public officials or private individuals”.

The Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of

Civilian Persons in Time of War was signed on 12 August

1949, and was ratified by the Governments of the United

States and Cuba; it entered into force on 21 October 1950.

A total of 188 States are currently parties to the

Convention. Article 23 decrees that

“Each High Contracting Party shall allow the free

passage of all consignments of medical and hospital

stores and objects necessary for religious worship

intended only for civilians of another High

Contracting Party, even if the latter is its adversary. It

shall likewise permit the free passage of all

consignments of essential foodstuffs, clothing and

tonics intended for children under fifteen, expectant

mothers and maternity cases”.

The first Protocol Additional to that Convention

specifically, precisely and categorically stipulates, in its

article 54, entitled “Protection of objects indispensable to

the survival of the civilian population”, that

“1. Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare

is prohibited.

“2. It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or

render useless objects indispensable to the survival of

the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural

areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock,

drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation

works, for the specific purpose of denying them for

their sustenance value to the civilian population or to

the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in

order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move

away, or for any other motive”.

Article VII of the 1948 Convention on genocide states,

without room for the slightest doubt, that

“Persons charged with genocide or any of the

other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a

competent tribunal of the State in the territory of

which the act was committed”.

Subparagraph (e) of article III of that Convention

stipulates with the same precision that accomplices to

genocide shall also be punished.

As a consequence, the National Assembly of

People's Power of the Republic of Cuba declared on 13

September 1999: first, that the economic blockade

imposed on Cuba by the Government of the United States

constitutes an international crime of genocide in

accordance with the definition stipulated in the

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the

Crime of Genocide, adopted by the General Assembly on

9 December 1948; second, that, on the basis of the

arguments put forward and of the foregoing statement, it

proclaims Cuba's right to demand that such acts be

punished; third, that as a result of the grave, systematic

and ongoing genocide carried out over the course of 40

years against the people of Cuba, and in accordance with

international standards, principles, agreements and laws,

Cuban courts have the right to try and punish the guilty

parties, whether they be present or absent; fourth, that

acts of genocide and other war crimes are not subject to

any statute of limitations; fifth, that the guilty parties can

be punished even with a sentence of life imprisonment;

sixth, that criminal responsibility does not exempt the

aggressor State from providing material compensation for

the human and economic damage it may have caused; and

seventh, that it calls on the international community for

support in this struggle to defend the most elementary

principles of justice, the right to life, peace and the

freedom of all peoples.

Here in this Hall today, as members of the Cuban

delegation to the General Assembly at its fifty-fourth

session, there are three young Cubans representing our

country's university students, secondary-school students,

and children and adolescents. They are here on behalf of

the social organizations that went before the relevant

courts to file the claim against the United States

Government, demanding reparations and compensation for

the damages and injuries suffered by thousands of people.

Those same organizations also took the legal initiative of

proposing to the National Assembly of People's Power the

proclamation I have just cited.

Here with us as well are three outstanding

personalities in Cuban medicine, Deputies in the National

Assembly, who have testified before that body on the

tragic harm that has resulted from the blockade on

medicines imposed against our country. There are also

three Christian deputies, whose profound ethical, religious

and human convictions led them to support the

proclamation made in our National Assembly demanding

the trial and punishment of the guilty parties.

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These individuals are prepared to respond, here in the

United States, to any questions posed to them, or to meet

with the press, academic institutions, non-governmental

organizations, legislators, senators or even any committee

of the United States Congress. We are prepared not only to

make accusations, but also to engage in debate and prove

the facts that support them.