Havana, April 5th, 2021.- On Monday afternoon, the General Director in charge of the United States of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, summoned the United States Charge d’Affaires, Timothy Zúñiga-Brown, to whom he conveyed the rejection of the misleading and politicized allegations that the 2020 State Department report on Human Rights made about Cuba.
Fernández de Cossío pointed out to the diplomat that the United States government opportunistically takes advantage of an issue as sensitive as human rights for its policy of aggression against countries that are not subordinate to the United States government, and that defend the sovereign right of their peoples to self-determination.
He emphasized that the aforementioned report is arbitrary and unilateral, and is characterized by allegations and accusations that are untrue. With regard to Cuba, it repeats slanders that political groups of the United States, with extreme positions against Cuba, have formulated for years as pretexts for the promotion of hostile actions and the imposition of coercive economic measures aimed at damaging the standard of living of the Cuban population and punish them for their support of the political, economic and social system that the country has freely and sovereignly chosen.
The Director General stated that the flagrant and systematic violations of human rights in the United States and by the government of that country are known and documented. These concern racism, xenophobia, police brutality, torture of prisoners, prolonged imprisonment, the use of secret prisons, anti-Semitism, McCarthyism, and other forms of religious and ideological intolerance. Added to this are the extrajudicial killings in various parts of the world and the arbitrary and prolonged detentions of innocent people.
He highlighted that Cuba enjoys international prestige in the field of human rights, due to the results it has achieved in the promotion and protection of these; for its tradition of cooperation with United Nations mechanisms that operate on a universal and non-discriminatory basis; and for the country’s solidarity support for the efforts of other developing nations to protect the rights of their peoples.
Cuba has recently been elected as a member of the Human Rights Council for the period 2021-2023 and is part of 44 of the 61 international human rights instruments. Fernández de Cossío urged the United States Government to cease its discrediting campaign against Cuba in the area of human rights and put an end to this and other unilateral and interventionist exercises on these issues.
April 5, 2021.
(Cubaminrex)
