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On
Oct. 30, Felipe Perez Roque, the Cuban minister of foreign affairs,
spoke at the United Nations. Perez detailed some of the disastrous
effects of the U.S. blockade on his country. His remarks were a reply
to President Bush, who several days earlier had announced plans to
tighten the blockade in order to hasten the overthrow of the
revolutionary government there.
In
his Oct. 24 speech, Bush shrugged off any responsibility of the U.S.
blockade for shortages in Cuba, and declared that any restoration of “trade
with Cuba would merely enrich the elites in power.”
Apparently
unaware of the irony in his words, the multi-millionaire Big Oil
president denounced what he called Cuba’s “ruling class.”
Bush
also announced plans for a multi-billion-dollar “Freedom Fund” to help
re-establish capitalism in Cuba. The money would be distributed to
Cubans, he said, when the country’s (new) leaders demonstrate their
commitment to freedom and when “the Cuban
government
removes its stranglehold on private economic activity.”
Perez
Roque took strong issue with Bush’s contention that the Cuban
government uses the blockade as an excuse for its own inability to
provide economic sustenance for the people. In half a century, he said,
the blockade has caused losses to Cuba of no less than $ 222 billion
(at the U.S. dollar’s current value).
“Cuban
children,” he said, “have been particularly harmed by the blockade that
President Bush has promised to strengthen. Cuban children cannot
receive Sevorane, an inhalation anesthetic manufactured by the American
company Abbott, which is the best for children’s general anesthesia. We
have to use lower-quality substitutes….
“The
Cuban children suffering from arrhythmias can no longer receive the
pacemakers that the American company Saint-Jude used to sell to us. ...
The U.S. delegation should explain to this Assembly why the Cuban
children suffering from cardiac arrhythmias are enemies of the U.S.
government.”
Cultural
activities on the international level have also been affected by the
blockade, Perez Roque pointed out. “Michael Moore, is being
investigated for the trip that he made to our country last March to
shoot his documentary ‘Sicko.’ It is, distinguished delegates,
21st-century McCarthyism.”
In
the field of finances, Perez Roque said, “over the last year, more than
a score of banks from various countries have been grossly threatened in
order to disrupt any kind of relation or transaction with Cuba.”
The
blockade, he said, “attempts to subdue the Cuban people through
starvation and disease. This is how the essence of the blockade on Cuba
was explained at a meeting led by President Dwight Eisenhower in
1960: ‘...there is no effective
political opposition in Cuba; therefore, the only foreseeable means
that we have today to estrange the internal support for the Revolution
is through disillusion and discouragement, based on dissatisfaction and
economic difficulties.
Any
conceivable means must be promptly used to weaken Cuba’s economic life.
Money and supplies to Cuba must be denied in order to decrease the real
and monetary wages with a view to causing hunger, despair and the
overthrow of the government.’”
He
pledged that Cuba “will not surrender. It fights and it will fight with
the conviction that defending our rights today is tantamount to
defending the right of all the peoples represented in this Assembly.”
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