Havana, April 5, 2021 – This Monday afternoon, the General Director in charge of the United States at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, summoned the United States Chargé d’Affaires, Timothy Zúñiga-Brown, to whom he conveyed his rejection of the misleading and politicised allegations made about Cuba in the State Department’s 2020 Human Rights report.
Fernández de Cossío pointed out to the diplomat that the US government is opportunistically taking advantage of such a sensitive issue as human rights for its policy of aggression against countries that do not subordinate themselves to the US government, and that defend the sovereign right of their peoples to self-determination.
He emphasised that the aforementioned report is arbitrary and unilateral, and it is characterised by allegations and imputations that are untrue. With regard to Cuba, it repeats slanders that political groups in the United States, with extreme positions against Cuba, have made for years as pretexts for the promotion of hostile actions and the imposition of coercive economic measures aimed at harming the standard of living of the Cuban population and punishing them for their support for the political, economic and social system that the country has freely and sovereignly chosen.
The Director General expressed that the flagrant and systematic violations of human rights in the United States and by the US government are well known and documented. These include racism, xenophobia, police brutality, torture of prisoners, prolonged imprisonment, use of secret prisons, anti-Semitism, McCarthyism and other forms of religious and ideological intolerance. To this must be added the extrajudicial killings in various parts of the world and the arbitrary and prolonged detention of innocent people.
He stressed that Cuba enjoys international prestige in the field of human rights, for the results it has achieved in the promotion and protection of human rights; for its tradition of cooperation with United Nations mechanisms that are applied 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 was recently elected as a member of the Human Rights Council for the period 2021-2023 and is party to 44 of the 61 international human rights instruments. Fernández de Cossío urged the US government to cease its campaign to discredit Cuba on human rights and to put an end to this and other unilateral and interfering exercises on these issues.