Cuba, 2011

I am pleased to welcome the Government of

South Sudan as a State Member of the United Nations.

I also join the appeal by all African leaders for an

urgent, effective and international response to the

famine in the Horn of Africa.

While we are engaged in debate here, in Libya

another preventive war is taking place under the

pretext of protecting civilians. The United States and

NATO, supposedly to avoid a massacre, launched a

military attack against a sovereign State without there

being any threat whatsoever to international peace and

security. They unleashed a regime change operation.

NATO imposed on the Security Council a dubious

resolution authorizing

“Member States … acting nationally or through

regional organizations or arrangements … to take

all necessary measures … to protect civilians and

civilian populated areas under threat of attack”

(resolution 1973 (2011), para. 4).

Afterwards, NATO violated this same resolution

in order to supply weapons, provide financing to one

party and deploy operatives and diplomatic personnel

on the ground. Now everybody has a better

understanding of what the concept of responsibility to

protect means and how it can be used. In this war, in

addition to the most advanced and lethal military

technologies, the means of communication have been

used as weapons of war by financial and media

businesses, which are profiteering from the war and the

reconstruction operations, as if they were agents of

crisis containment.

As early as 21 February, Commander-in-Chief

Fidel Castro Ruz warned that NATO was irrevocably

preparing a war against Libya. Since then, Cuba has

engaged indefatigably in the defence not of a

Government but of a principle. It is unacceptable to

assassinate thousands of innocent people under the

dubious purpose of protecting other civilians. History

has eloquently demonstrated that peace cannot be

imposed either by war or by force. It is up to the

Libyan people alone to choose their destiny, without

foreign intervention, in the exercise of their right to

self-determination, independence and sovereignty over

their natural resources and their country’s territorial

integrity.

The military intervention in Libya and the

growing threat against Syria have been the

opportunistic, defensive responses of the United States

and Europe to the collapse of their system of

domination and plunder in North Africa and the Middle

East and to the emergence of genuinely popular

movements in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries, in

order to secure huge reserves of oil and water and to

confiscate financial assets in times of global economic

and social crisis. It is the responsibility of the General

Assembly to exercise its full powers to prevent a

military aggression against Syria. The public should be

have objective information and speak up against war.

President Barack Obama, in his threatening,

deceitful, rhetorical speeches of 20 and 21 September,

described what happened in Libya as a new model. He

said,

“This is how the international community should

work in the twenty-first century. More nations are

assuming the responsibility and the costs of

meeting global challenges. In fact, this is the very

purpose of the United Nations. So every nation

represented here today can take pride in the

innocent lives we saved and in helping Libyans

reclaim their country. It was the right thing to

do.”

A top White House official wrote in Foreign

Affairs magazine that the new United States strategy is

more efficient and less costly. The Bush Administration

strategy considered occupation; the Obama Administration

strategy is that of national liberation. The military

intervention strategy in Libya could also be applied in

other cases.

With absolute cynicism, what is proposed is a

military aggression without casualties or the use of

infantry troops, the costs of which would be mainly

borne by Europe. The destabilization of a country

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through subversion, covert operations and economic

sanctions is described, according to this doctrine, as

the development of a national movement. That new

regime-change operations model shows that current

United States and NATO military doctrines are even

more aggressive than their previous ones, and that the

so called Euro-Atlantic periphery comprises the entire

planet.

No one should doubt that Latin America and the

Caribbean are included in that concept. The

redeployment of the Fourth Fleet, the installation of

American bases, troops and military means to intervene

anywhere in the region, the coup d’état against

Venezuela in 2002, followed by an oil coup, the

sedition in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the military coup in

Honduras and the attempted coup in Ecuador all fit

perfectly in the new strategy.

Can the United States and NATO guarantee today

that the use of force and this concept of regime change

do not apply in the case of Latin American and

Caribbean countries that do not submit to their

interests? Can the European Union say something

about it? What would the United Nations do in such a

situation?

The weakness of the global economy, particularly

the economies of the United States and Europe,

continues to show that the economic crisis that began

in the year 2008 has not yet been overcome. In

developed countries, the terrible burden of its

consequences is borne by workers, the unemployed,

immigrants and the poor, who are brutally repressed

whenever they peacefully defend their rights.

We, the countries of the South, repeatedly

plundered, suffer the distortions of a world economic

order that excludes our legitimate interests. We suffer

under the onerous impact of protectionism and the

steady increase in the prices of foodstuffs and

hydrocarbons. The peoples of many developing

countries are victims of the bankrupt neoliberal

economic model and its sequel of plunder and

exclusion. The social and political consequences are

being felt on all continents.

In the face of a global economic crisis and the

depletion of the planet’s natural resources, what will be

the response of the extremist right-wing forces that are

already in power or may come to power as a result of

the afflictions and hopelessness of voters? In the face

of a growing and universal danger of war, of a new

division of the world and of climate change, could we,

the countries of the South, act together as an essential

condition of our salvation?

In the face of so many serious threats, Latin

America and the Caribbean — the region of Bolívar

and Martí — is coming together, determined to finish

what they left unfinished. It is impossible to divide us

or to turn us against each other. The Bolivarian

Alliance for the Peoples of Our America is a small but

morally powerful group of peoples, and the new

Community of Latin American and Caribbean States is

a fact. The full strength of the Andes will very soon be

expressed in a summit, which will be an epoch-making

event in Caracas — the epicentre of independence in

the Americas, where a Bolivarian people has conquered

power and a continental leader, President Hugo Chávez

Frías, is ever growing.

More than ever, we have to defend the United

Nations, but the biggest challenge will be to turn it into

an organization that serves the legitimate interests of

all States, instead of catering to the arbitrary wishes

and abuses of a few rich and powerful countries. We

must see to it that international law and the purposes

and principles of the United Nations Charter prevail in

the face of the brute force that aims to block them. It is

necessary to re-establish the leading role of the General

Assembly and to recast the Security Council.

The General Assembly has the inescapable moral,

political and legal obligation to ensure the recognition

of an independent Palestinian State, with the

boundaries established before 1967 and with East

Jerusalem as its capital, as a full Member of the United

Nations. This should be accomplished with or without

the Security Council, with or without the veto of the

United States and with or without new peace

negotiations.

If the inalienable right of the Palestinian people

to independence, sovereignty and self-determination is

recognized; if the need to re-establish the exercise of

the human rights of Palestinians is recognized; if the

blockade of Gaza, the economic coercion and

segregation symbolized by the infamous wall are

recognized as crimes; if the subjugation of a nation to

conditions jeopardizing its very existence is described

as genocide; if all Member States are supposed to

adopt all legal measures within their reach to protect

Palestinian civilians, then the General Assembly should

take action now.

15 11-51390

Cuba, a country with a small Jewish community,

condemns the historical injustice of anti-Semitism, the

crime against humanity that was the Holocaust, and

recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist. Our

people harbour only fraternal feelings towards the

Israeli people, who are also victims of this conflict.

Cuba likewise proclaims that the United States

has the moral, political and legal obligation to stop its

continual veto of Security Council resolutions intended

to protect the Palestinian civilians.

The European Union should oppose this veto and

abstain from supporting the empire’s brutal pressure on

members of this Assembly and the Council itself.

Europe should denounce it also because it is certain

that those crimes would not be occurring without the

military supplies, financial support and impunity that

the United States provides to the Government of Israel.

On 11 September 2001, we Cubans shared the

pain of the American people at those atrocious terrorist

acts. We offered selfless solidarity, encouragement and

cooperation. As always, Cuba made crystal-clear

statements against terrorism and against war.

Ten years later, the world is even more insecure,

because instead of turning international consensus

against terrorism into a system of international

cooperation to confront it, the United States invaded

and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, causing the loss of

life of hundreds of thousands of persons and pain to

tens of millions. It was not possible to hide the use of

deception, torture, extrajudicial executions or

assassinations, disappearances of individuals, arbitrary

detentions and the secret renditions and prisons of the

Central Intelligence Agency in Europe and other

regions.

The Government of the United States desecrates

the memory of the victims of 11 September when it

continues the prolonged inhumane imprisonment of the

five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters who were unjustly

condemned, in spurious trials, to sentences of

maximum severity for seeking information about the

terrorist activities of groups that have operated with

absolute impunity from United States territory against

Cuba, leading to the death of or physical harm to 5,577

of our citizens. Once again, with all due respect, I urge

President Obama to make use of his powers to release

them as an act of justice or as a humanitarian gesture,

which would be highly appreciated by their children,

wives, mothers, fathers and all of our people.

The Cuban Government reiterates its interest and

willingness to move towards the normalization of

relations with the United States. Today I reiterate the

proposal to begin a dialogue aimed at solving bilateral

problems, including humanitarian issues, as well as our

offer to negotiate several cooperation agreements

concerning drug-trafficking, terrorism, human

smuggling, natural disasters and protection of the

environment, including in the event of oil spills such as

the one that occurred at the British Petroleum platform

in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, we know that the electoral race has

already begun in this country, while the economic

situation is growing worse.

The economic, commercial and financial

blockade of Cuba has been tightened. The damages it

has caused have totalled $975 billion, based on the

current price of gold. The attempt to subvert the

constitutional order that Cubans have freely elected is

intensifying. There is increasing pressure from the

extreme right and the Cuban-American mafia to

reverse the minimal steps adopted by the American

Government to promote, to some degree, links between

Cuban émigrés and their home country and exchanges

between both peoples.

In Cuba, President Raúl Castro Ruz has reiterated

that we will continue, in our own sovereign way, to

change everything that needs to be changed in order to

make our economy more efficient and our socialism

better, to achieve full justice and to be able to fully

preserve our independence.

As Martí said, “The southern sea will join the sea

of the north and a serpent will hatch from the egg of an

eagle before we cease our struggle to make the

homeland free and prosperous.”