Cuban Foreign Minister: The US government can not be a reference for Latin America

(Stenographic Versions – Council of State)

The Vice President of the United States of America seems ill-informed, ignores reality, hides the truth.

I want to ask Mr. Pence directly if the Monroe Doctrine guides his government or not, in his policy toward Latin America.

I want to respond with words from Bolívar: “The United States seems destined by Providence to plague America with miseries in the name of freedom.”

I want to quote Marti: What I did to this day, and I will do, is to prevent the United States from spreading through the Antilles and falling with that force more on the lands of America.

It is not democratic to attack Venezuela and mention President Nicolás Maduro Moros, when he has been excluded and is not here to answer him.

I reject the insulting references to Cuba and Venezuela and the humiliating attitude for Latin America and the Caribbean that it has assumed.

The moral vacuum of the government of the United States can not be, it is not a reference for Latin America and the Caribbean.

In the last 100 years they bear the responsibility for the most brutal abuses against human rights and human dignity. All the despotic governments in the region, all without exception, have been imposed or have received support from the government of the United States, including the most cruel military dictatorships. Shameful acts like Operation Condor or the bloody coup d’état in Chile are about the conscience of North American governments.

Mr. Pence’s country has been the first and the only one to use the nuclear weapon against innocent civilians. He is responsible for criminal wars and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of deaths, massacres of civilians, including children, women and the elderly, which they call collateral damage.

He is responsible for acts of torture, disappearances, extrajudicial executions and kidnappings.

The government of the United States is the author of massive, flagrant and systematic violations of the human rights of its own African-American citizens, of Hispanics, of migrants and of minorities.

It is a shame for humanity that in this country of extreme wealth there are tens and tens of millions of poor people.

They have a differentiated racial pattern in their prisons and in the application of the death penalty; is where most judicial errors associated with the execution of people occur; It is where students are killed by guns, whose lives were sacrificed to the imperative of political lobbying, particularly in Florida.

The government of the United States has received tens and tens of millions of dollars from the arms lobby, and a Miami senator has received no less than 3 million for the same concept.

Miami is where the political mafias are, where confessed international terrorists take refuge and is also the place of the famous electoral fraud of the year 2000.

Mr. Pence has not said, when he talks about corruption, that his country is the center of the laundering of financial assets of drug trafficking and the smuggling of weapons to the south that destabilizes entire countries.

The electoral system that has elected him and the legislature, in which he has served for a long time, is corrupt by nature, because it is supported in an unusually legal way in the corporate financial contributions and the so-called Political Action Committees.

It is the government that imposes a fierce protectionism, which does not take into account that it will ruin industry, agriculture and employment throughout our region.

It is where the political lobby has imposed the idea that climate change is an anti-American invention.

It is the political and electoral system where there has been scandalous traffic with the private data of tens of millions of its citizens.

If your government were interested in the well-being, human rights and self-determination of Cubans, it could lift the blockade, collaborate with our international cooperation, instead of sabotaging it, and give funds to Cuban medical collaboration programs in the world and literacy programs.

He has referred insultingly to Cuba. I respond with the text of the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed in Havana by the Heads of State of Latin America and the Caribbean in 2014, whose principles include the inalienable right of peoples and States to freely give their own political, economic, social and cultural system.

I also respond with a paragraph of the historical document signed at the time of this event, at the José Martí International Airport in Havana, by His Holiness Pope Francis and by His Holiness Patriarch Kirill, who chose Cuba to sign a document It says: “Our fraternal encounter has taken place in Cuba, at the crossroads between North and South, East and West. From this island, symbol of the hopes of the «New World» and of the dramatic events of 20th century history … »

We are a few hours away from the 57th anniversary of the bombing of US planes at airports in Cuba, in which Cubans died in defense of our independence and sovereignty, in whose farewell to duel the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution was proclaimed, and It is surprising that, for so many decades, Vice President Pence has come here to use the same language that led governments of that time to carry out this terrible event.

The events that have taken place in recent years show that coexistence between the United States and Cuba is possible, productive and can be civilized.

For that, do not wait for him, nor the delegation that now occupies the seat that he has just left, for Cuba to give up one millimeter of its principles, nor cease in its efforts to build socialism.

Canciller cubano: El gobierno de EEUU no puede ser una referencia para América Latina