United States and the "Human" Right to Blockade the People of Cuba

Perhaps with certain shame - he barely lifted his eyes from the paper he was given to read - the United States representative at the UN tried to justify again, with the same old lie, the policy of the genocidal blockade that his country keeps against Cuba.

"The people of the United States support the people of Cuba," was the first thing he said after listening to a dozen speakers, including the Cuban Foreign Minister, denouncing the damage that the blockade represents, from all points of view, to Cubans.

The policy coordinator of the United States mission in the UN, Rodney Hunter, also said that the sanctions imposed on countries are a legitimate way to carry out foreign policy, national security issues and other objectives.

“The United States is not alone in this opinion or in this practice. Sanctions are a single set of tools in our broader effort toward Cuba to advance democracy, human rights are respected, and help the Cuban people exercise the fundamental freedoms set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, said Hunter. "So, we are opposed to this resolution."

His words sounded both faker and hollower than ever if one takes into account that they were pronounced in the context of a global pandemic that his country is taking advantage of, in an opportunistic and cowardly way, to keep and prolong an economic blockade that lasts for more than sixty years.

Will the right to apply sanctions which only goal is to try to subdue, through hunger and misery, the independent and sovereign political election of a country - as prescribed in the early 1960s by Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Lester Mallory- be included among the fundamental freedoms written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Is among the issues of National Security the blackmail exerted on the current administration by a gang of gangsters, created against Cuba in times of the cold war, by that same "exemplary democracy" that today legislates in a fortified Capitol?

In reality, the United States has never cared a bit about the rights of the Cuban people. And there’s history to prove it – no wonder Obama, "the good guy," wanted us to forget.

In their manipulation of the so-called manifest destiny - blatant invention of proclaiming itself as a nation destined to expand - the "democratic" U.S. imperialists denied, in the time of Hamilton Fish, the recognition of the belligerence of the Cuban patriots. The same did Cleveland and McKinley, during the war of 1895, against the majority and true sentiment of the North American people.

During the two wars against Spanish colonialism, while they sold arms and gunboats wholesale to the Spanish army, they blocked and persecuted, through the use of spies and courts, the expeditions that the Cuban exiles in that country, with the sacrifice of their savings, they managed to gathered to send supplies to the fighters in the Cuban mountains.

Since the days of ripe fruit - Platt Amendment and mediatized Republic in-between - the only interests that the United States has defended in Cuba are theirs.

And the Cuban people they claim to support today is none other than the small groups of mercenaries who, for more than sixty years, have been training and financing to justify the blockade which, they say, will one day culminate in a "humanitarian" bloodbath.

The latest proof of this unrestrained "love" for the Cuban people was given at the UN by the policy coordinator for the U.S. mission in the UN, Rodney Hunter, defending - with sad cynicism? - the "human right" of keeping intact, in the midst of a pandemic, the 243 sanctions against Cuba -55 of them taken during 2020- imposed by Donald Trump.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff