STATEMENT BY CUBAN MISSION TO UN: "Human Rights Activists or Terrorists"

[magbana]

PRESS RELEASE
May 21, 2008

http://embacuba.cubaminrex.cu/Default.aspx?tabid=7928

Human rights activists or terrorists?

Cubans have achieved substantive progress in the enjoyment of their human
rights; whether in the area of economic, social and cultural rights, in the
area of civil and political rights, or in the realization of the so-called
third-generation or solidarity rights. Since 1959, Cuba ceased to be the
country of 600 000 unemployed people; 500 000 farmers who worked during 4
months of the year and starved the rest of the time; 10 000 classrooms
without a teacher and 400 000 industrial and farm workers whose retirement
pension was embezzled by corrupt governors and administrators.

However, the aggressive policies, programs and actions by successive United
States governments against Cuba to annihilate the revolutionary process set
out by the Cuban people have been a constant for almost 50 years of Cuban
Revolution.

The obsessive hostility of the United States against Cuba has reached
unheard-of levels. Never before has a foreign policy against a nation been
endowed with such an ample and sophisticated armory of aggressive measures
in the political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, military, psychological
and ideological fields. No policy of active coercion and hostility against a
country has lasted for so long, in spite of the fact that the two countries
are not in a state of declared war.

Without respect for any barrier of legality or reason whatsoever, the
actions and measures taken by the Bush Administration have been aimed at
attaining the main objective of the US policy against Cuba: defeating the
process of deep revolutionary transformations taken up by the Cuban people.
Any ways and means to attain the set goal are valid; the military option has
not been ruled out.

The well-tried euphemism of “promoting transition toward democracy and
respect for human rights” attempts to hide the imperialist motivation behind
the US aggressive plans against the Cuban people. The temporal factor of
urgency added in the last few years to the messages and statements of
high-level representatives of Washington regarding its determination to
promote a “transition” in Cuba – that is, a “regime change” – incorporates
an additional warning sign in the assessment of the anti-Cuban plans of the
Bush Administration.

In this undeclared war against the Cuban nation, the recruitment, direction
and logistic and financial support to mercenaries at the services of its
policy inside the Island, has been a key objective of the design and
implementation of the anti-Cuban strategy.

If the US involvement – including through its Interests Section in Cuba
(SINA) – in supplying and financing the internal mercenaries with government
funds has been proved in the past, now there is new information that further
proves the acting of those diplomats as vulgar curriers at the service of a
notorious Cuban-born terrorist.
The current bonanza period for the internal subversion, carried out through
the US Interests Section in Havana is further marked by the recent
irrefutable evidence confirming these mercenaries’ undeniable links with
known terrorists such as Santiago Álvarez Fernández Magriñá, who is
currently imprisoned in the United States under charges of illegal
possession of weapons to carry out violent actions against Cuba, who is also
close with Luis Posada Carriles, the most infamous terrorist of the Western
Hemisphere.

Santiago Álvarez sends money to the paid mercenaries in the Island through
the Judicial Rescue Foundation, which gets a substantial part of its funds
from governmental contributions of the United States.

In this terrorist’s record, circulated with red alert by INTERPOL, there
appear criminal actions such as his links with the masterminding of the
attempt against Fidel Castro’s life in Panama in 2000 and the preparation,
financing and introduction of terrorists in the province of Villa Clara to
sabotage Cuban tourist resorts in actions that would claim numerous human
lives.

The mercenaries at the service of the imperialist policy against the Cuban
people – always under the US special services’ express instructions – have
mutated its “fighting methods” since 1959 according to the requirements of
each phase of the strategy of aggression against the Island. They have gone
from invaders to terrorists and from terrorists to alleged “champions” of
human rights, and their true identity has been proved once again these days.

The undercover operations by the US special services against Cuba started in
the very 1959, as shown by CIA declassified reports. For example, on 17
March 1960, President Eisenhower passed the so-called “Program of Covert
Action against the Castro Regime”, suggested by the CIA, which authorized
the creation of a secret intelligence and action organization inside Cuba,
with all the necessary fund for that purpose. It may be recalled that also
on 17 April 1961, Washington sent some 1 500 mercenaries against the Cuban
people, at the head of which it assigned mostly former militaries from the
pro-American tyranny of Fulgencio Batista.

For years, and with an extreme degree of continuity, the motivations,
recruitment and payment methods and the ways to assign tasks to the
mercenaries of the anti-Cuban policy have lived on. Only the apparel and the
aggression instruments supplied to the anti-Cuban mercenaries have changed.

The rise of the Reagan administration to power in the US in the 1980’s
imposed important tactical changes in the US strategy to overthrow the Cuban
Revolution. Overnight, notorious Cuban-born terrorists and CIA agents turned
up supplied with costumes – and offices, “organizations” and connections to
international NGOs – of champions of human rights and of “peaceful
anti-Castro opponents”.

According to former CIA agent Philip Agee “In the early 1980s, it was
decided that more terrorist operations were required to impose a regime
change in Cuba. Terrorism had not worked, nor the Bay of Pigs invasion, nor
the diplomatic isolation of Cuba, which had gradually decreased, nor the
economic embargo. Now Cuba would be included in a new worldwide program to
finance and develop non-governmental and voluntary organizations…”
It was during this period that the Cuban-American National Foundation (FNCA)
was created with the aim of “promoting a peaceful democratic transition in
Cuba”, though it actually demonstrated that it never refrained from
terrorist actions, including assassination attempts against the Cuban Head
of State and the organization and financing of terrorist actions against
tourist resorts in the Cuba of the late 1990s.

Small groups of alleged “peaceful dissidents” and “champions of human
rights” were created inside the Island, directly involved with US SINA
officials in their subversive plans, recruiting persons engaged in violent
activities, and even former officials, police and other elements of lowly
human condition, linked with Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. These
recruited and paid people carry out missions instructed by the US, with the
objective of destroying the constitutional order chosen by the Cubans and of
enforcing the Helms-Burton Act.

In the last few years, the George W. Bush administration has escalated the
blockade and hostility measures against Cuba, the public and covert meddling
actions, the threat declarations by high-ranking officials and particularly,
an increasing direct engagement of its diplomats to Havana in the promotion
of the subversion of the Cuban constitutional order and an exponential
increase of the official funds devoted to these operations.

The Cuban people face the possibility that these mercenaries’ activities be
used, taking advantage of the US government’s capacity to manipulate the
public opinion, as a pretext to carry out or provide support to a possible
US military aggression against Cuba, a possibility that has become ever
actual and near in the current state of affairs.

In the revision of the anti-Cuban strategy proposed by the so-called
“Commission for assistance to a Free Cuba” in July 2006, it is suggested
that within two years, 80 million dollars a year be earmarked for the
destabilization of the Cuban system and another 20 million dollars a year
for subversive actions and propaganda campaigns once “the dictatorship
ceases to exist”.

These overwhelming increase of funds and means for recruitment and financing
of anti-Cuban mercenaries, and the decision to escalate to unprecedented
levels the involvement of US agencies in the destabilization, weakening of
the system and strengthening of the siege to Cuba, prove the seriousness of
the threat, even a military one for Cuba.

Cuba denounces the outrageous direct links among the mercenary groups inside
Cuba, the convicted terrorists in Miami and the US administration.

New York, 21 May 2008