YouSaid · the spoken record

Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez

lines on the record: 71
first: 2018-09-24
most recent: 2023-09-24
sittings or episodes: 3
sources: un-general-debate

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Cuba can always be counted on to defend multilateralism and to jointly promote peace and sustainable development for all. It will always be an honour to fight for justice, sharing the difficulties and challenges with the people of the South that are willing to change history. And we will win.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Cuba will continue to strengthen its democracy and its socialist model, which even under siege has shown how much a developing country — small in size and with modest natural wealth — can do. We will continue our transformative process, seeking ways out of the siege imposed on us by United States imperialism and ways to achieve the prosperity with social justice that our people deserve. In that endeavour, we will never give up the right to defend ourselves. I wish to conclude by extending an invitation to everyone to work to overcome differences and to face common challenges together and with a sense of urgency. To achieve that, the United Nations and the General Assembly, even with their limitations, are the most powerful instruments at our disposal.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“We support dialogue and cooperation as effective ways to ensure the promotion and protection of human rights, without politicization or selectivity and without the application of double standards, conditions or pressure. In that spirit. Cuba submitted its candidacy to the Human Rights Council for the period 2024-2026 in the elections that will be held on 10 October. We would like to thank in advance for their trust those countries that have already given us their valuable support. If elected. Cuba will continue to raise its voice for a universal vision, representative of the South and in favour of the legitimate interests of developing countries, based on a constructive commitment to. and unwavering responsibility for. the full realization of all human rights for all.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“We will continue to strengthen relations with Cuban emigrants in every corner of the planet. The promotion and protection of human rights is a common ideal that requires a genuine spirit of respect and constructive dialogue among States. Unfortunately. 75 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the reality is very different. That issue has become a political weapon of powerful nations that seek to subject independent nations, mainly in the South, to their geopolitical designs. No country is exempt from challenges, just as no country has the authority to designate itself as a model for human rights or to stigmatize other models, cultures or sovereign States.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Under the cover of that arbitrary and fraudulent accusation, it extorts hundreds of banking and financial institutions all over the world, forcing them to choose between continuing their relations with the United States or maintaining their ties with Cuba. Our country is suffering a real siege — an extraterritorial, cruel and silent economic war — one that is supported by a powerful political machinery of destabilization, with billions of dollars in funds approved by the United States Congress, aimed at capitalizing on the shortages caused by the blockade and undermining the constitutional order of the country and the peace of our citizens. Despite the hostility of the United States Government, we will continue to build bridges with the country’s people, as we do with all the peoples of the world.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The United States actions against the medical cooperation provided by Cuba in many nations are shameful. It has gone so far as to openly threaten sovereign Governments that have requested such help to respond to the public health needs of their populations. The United States deprives its citizens of the right to travel to Cuba, in defiance of its own Constitution. The tightening of the blockade has contributed to an increase in migratory flows registered in our country in recent years, which imposes a painful cost on Cuban families and has adverse demographic and economic consequences for the nation. The Government of the United States lies and does enormous damage to the international efforts to combat terrorism when it accuses Cuba, without any basis whatsoever, of being a sponsor of that scourge.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The United States Government pressured entities not to supply the medical oxygen and pulmonary ventilators that were needed in Cuba to face the peak of the pandemic. Our Cuban scientists created the vaccines and developed the pulmonary ventilators needed save our country, and we also made them available to other countries in the world. With surgical and vicious precision. Washington and Florida calculated how to inflict the greatest possible damage on Cuban families. The United States has tried and continues to try to prevent the supply of fuel and lubricants to our country, an action that would seem unthinkable in peacetime. In a globalized world, it is not only absurd but criminal to prohibit access to technologies, including medical equipment for which more than 10 per cent of the components are from the United States.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Cuba has not implemented a single measure or action aimed at harming the United States through damage to its economic sector, trade or social fabric. Cuba has not engaged in any action to threaten the independence or national security of the United States or to impair its sovereign rights, interfere in its internal affairs or affect its people’s well-being. The behaviour of the United States is absolutely unilateral and unjustified. Every day. the Cuban people use creative ways to resist and overcome that merciless economic war which, since 2019. at the height of the coronavirus disease pandemic, has been escalated opportunistically to reach an even more extreme, cruel and inhumane dimension. Its effects have been brutal.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz. and Army General Raul Castro Ruz. to speak these truths and the ideals of peace and justice of a small archipelago that has resisted and will continue to resist, reflecting the dignity, courage and unwavering resolve of its people and history. But I cannot stand in this global platform without once again denouncing the fact that for 60 years now. Cuba has been suffering a suffocating economic blockade designed to depress its income and living standards, inflict continuous shortages of food, medicines and other basic supplies and restrict its development potential. That is the nature and those are the objectives of the policy of economic coercion and maximum pressure applied by the Government of the United States against Cuba, in violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The pressures to isolate and weaken economies and sovereign States are also currently affecting Venezuela and Nicaragua, and. both before and after those cases, they have been the prelude to invasions and the overthrowing of inconvenient Governments in the Middle East. We reject the unilateral coercive measures imposed on countries such as Zimbabwe. Syria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Iran, among many others, whose peoples suffer the negative impact of those measures. We reiterate our solidarity with the cause of the Palestinian people. We support the right to self-determination of the Saharan people. Let us strive for a world of peace, without wars or conflicts. Five years ago. I spoke for the first time from this rostrum (see A/73/PV.8). where once stood the historic leader of the Cuban revolution.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“In addition to all the problems and challenges of the realities of our nations and which are mobilizing peoples, there are unilateral coercive measures — euphemistically called sanctions — which have become a practice of powerful States purporting to act as universal judges to weaken and destroy economies and isolate and subjugate sovereign States. Cuba is not the first sovereign State against which measures of that nature have been applied, but it is the one that has endured them the longest. That is despite the worldwide condemnation of them expressed almost unanimously every year in the Assembly, which is intentionally disrespected and ignored by the Government of the biggest economic, financial and military Power in the world. We were not the first, and we will not the last.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The 17 cooperation projects that Cuba has set up in the context of its chairmanship of the G77 will contribute to channelling the potential for South South and triangular cooperation. We urge the richest nations and international organizations to participate in those initiatives. Cuba will not relent in its efforts to boost the creative potential, influence and leadership of the G77. Our Group has much to contribute to the multilateralism, stability, justice and rationality that the world requires today.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The priority of the G77 is to shift, once and for all. the paradigms of science, technology and innovation, which are limited to the environment and perspectives of the North, thus depriving the international scientific community of considerable intellectual capital. The successful Havana summit launched an urgent appeal to centre science, technology and innovation around the indispensable objective of sustainable development. At the summit, we decided to resume the work of the Consortium on Science. Technology and Innovation for the South in order to promote joint research projects and foster productive linkages aimed at reducing dependence on Northern markets. We also agreed to promote the convening, in 2025. of a high-level meeting of the General Assembly on science, technology and innovation for development.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“the G77 countries will need to prioritize the exercise of a global balance, the implementation of the Loss and Damage Fund, the definition of the framework for the adaptation goal and the establishment of a new climate financing goal, fully abiding by the principle of shared but differentiated responsibilities. The G77 is organizing a summit of the leaders of the South, to be held on 2 December, in the context of COP28 in Dubai. That initiative, unprecedented in the context of a Conference of the Parties, will provide a forum in which to articulate the positions of our Group at the highest level in the context of the climate negotiations. COP28 will demonstrate whether, beyond the speeches, there is a real political will on the part of developed nations to achieve the urgent agreements required on this issue.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“It is also no secret that those who are least responsible for climate change are the ones suffering the most from its effects, particularly small island developing States. Meanwhile, industrialized countries, voracious predators of resources and the environment, elude their greatest responsibility and fail to comply with their commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement. To mention just one example, it is extremely disappointing that the goal of mobilizing no less than $100 billion a year until 2020. for climate financing, has never once been met. On the eve of the twenty-eighth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28).”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The Group reiterates today its call on public, multilateral and private creditors to refinance the debt with credit guarantees, lower interests and longer maturities. We insist on the implementation of a multilateral mechanism to renegotiate sovereign debt, with the effective participation of the countries of the South, that will allow for a fair, balanced and development-oriented treatment. It is imperative to redesign, once and for all. the debt instruments and to include activation provisions to alleviate and restructure said debt whenever a country is affected by natural catastrophes or macroeconomic shocks — problems that are so common among the most vulnerable nations. No one in their right mind is denying now that climate change is threatening the survival of all. with irreversible effects.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“almost twice as much the amount of special drawing rights allocated by the International Monetary Fund. A streamlining, review and change of the role of credit rating agencies is needed. It is also critical to establish criteria beyond gross domestic product to define the access of developing countries to financing under favourable conditions and to adequate technical cooperation. While the richest countries fail to meet the commitment to allocate at least 0.7 per cent of their gross national income to official development assistance, the nations of the South need to spend up to 14 per cent of their income to service their foreign debt. Most G77 nations are forced to allocate more resources to servicing the debt than to investing in health or education. What sustainable development can be achieved with that noose on their necks?”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The G77 clamours for rights and will continue to demand a profound transformation of the current international financial architecture because it is deeply unjust, anachronistic and dysfunctional and because it was designed to profit from the reserves of the South and perpetuate a system of domination that increases underdevelopment and replicates a pattern of modern colonialism. We need and demand financial institutions in which our countries can have real decision-making capacity and access to financing. We urgently need a recapitalization of multilateral development banks in order to radically improve their lending conditions and meet the financial needs of the South. The member countries of this Group were forced to allocate $379 billion from their reserves to protect their currencies in 2022.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“In the midst of the twenty-first century, it shocks the human conscience that almost 800 million persons suffer from hunger in a planet that produces enough to feed everyone and that, in the era of knowledge and accelerated development of information and communication technologies, more than 760 million persons — two thirds women — do not know how to read or write. The efforts of developing countries are not enough to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They must be supported by concrete actions to provide access to markets, financing under fair and preferential conditions, technology transfer and North-South cooperation. We are not begging for alms or favours.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“The countries represented in the G77 and China, where 80 per cent of the global population lives, face not only the challenge of development, but also the responsibility to modify the structures that marginalize us from global progress and turn many peoples of the South into laboratories of renewed forms of domination. A new and more just global contract is urgently needed. Only seven years ahead of the deadline set for the implementation of the promising 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the panorama is discouraging. This institution has already recognized that. At the current pace, none of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals will be achieved and more than half of the 169 agreed targets will not be met.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“We are brought together by the need to change that which remains unresolved and by the condition of being the main victims of the current global multidimensional crisis, the abusive unequal exchange, the scientific and technical gap and the degradation of the environment. But we have also been brought together, for more than half a century now. by the inescapable challenge and the determination to transform the current international order, which is exclusionary, irrational, unsustainable for the planet and non-viable for the well-being of all.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“During those two virtually non-stop days, more than 100 representatives from the 134 nations that comprise the Group raised their voices to call for changes that can no longer be postponed amid the unjust, irrational and abusive international economic order that, year after year, has deepened the enormous inequalities between a minority of very developed nations and a majority that has not managed to shed the euphemism of “developing nations”. Worse still, as recognized by the Secretary-General at the Havana Summit, the G77 was founded six decades ago to repair centuries of injustice and abandonment and. in today’s convulsive world, they are entangled in a host of world crises, where poverty is on the rise and hunger is ever-growing.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
“I am bringing to this Assembly the voice of the South, the voice of the “exploited and scorned” — the words of Ernesto Che Guevara in this same Hall almost 60 years ago (see A/PV.1299). We are diverse peoples with the same problems. We just confirmed that recently in Havana, which was honoured to host a summit of leaders and other high representatives of the Group of 77 (G77) and China, the most representative, broad and diverse group in the multilateral arena.”
2023-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 78 (2023)
““Doctors and not bombs.” That was announced one day by the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution and chief sponsor of scientific development in Cuba: Commander in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz. That's our motto. Saving lives and sharing what we are and have, no matter any sacrifice it takes; that is what we are offering to the world from the United Nations, to which we only request to be attuned with the gravity of the present time. We are Cuba. Let us strive together to promote peace, solidarity and development. Thank you very much.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Cuba's scientific community, another source of pride for the nation that, since the triumph of the Revolution of the just, announced to the world its intention to be a country of men and women of science, is working non-stop on one of the first vaccines that are going through clinical trials in the world. Its creators and other researchers and experts, in coordination with the health system, are writing protocols on healthcare for infected persons, recovered patients and the risk population that have allowed us to keep epidemic statistics of around 80 per cent of infected persons saved and a mortality rate below the average in the Americas and the world.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“We reject foreign interference into the internal affairs of the Republic of Belarus and reiterate our solidarity with the legitimate president of that country, Aleksandr Lukashenko, and the sisterly people of Belarus. We condemn the interference into the internal affairs of the People's Republic of China and oppose any attempt to harm its territorial integrity and its sovereignty. Mr. President, Today's disturbing circumstances have led to the fact that, for the first time in the 75-year-long history of the United Nations, we have had to meet in a non-presential format.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“We demand a just solution to the conflict in the Middle East, which must include the real exercise by the Palestinian people of the inalienable right to build their own State within the borders prior to 1967 and with East Jerusalem as its capital. We reject Israel's attempts to annex more territories in the West Bank. We state our solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran in the face of US aggressive escalation. We reaffirm our invariable solidarity with the Sahrawi people. We strongly condemn the unilateral and unjust sanctions against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. We restate our rejection of the intention to expand NATO's presence to the Russian borders and the imposition of unilateral and unjust sanctions against Russia.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“We reaffirm our historical commitment with the self determination and independence of the sisterly people of Puerto Rico. We support the legitimate claim by Argentina to its sovereignty over the Malvinas, the South Sandwich and South Georgia islands. We reiterate our commitment with peace in Colombia and the conviction that dialogue between the parties is the road to achieving stable and lasting peace in that country. We support the search for a peaceful and negotiated solution to the situation imposed on Syria, with no foreign interference and in full respect of its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“We wish to restate publicly in this virtual forum that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela shall always have the solidarity of Cuba in the face of attempts at destabilizing and subverting constitutional order and the civic-military unity and at destroying the work started by Commander Hugo Chavez Frias and continued by President Nicolas Maduro Moros to benefit the Venezuelan people. We also reject US actions aimed at destabilizing the Republic of Nicaragua and ratify our invariable solidarity with its people and government led by Commander Daniel Ortega. We state our solidarity with the Caribbean nations, which are demanding just reparations for the horrors of slavery and the slave trade, in a world where racial discrimination and the repression against Afro-descendant communities have been on the rise.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Our dedicated health workers, the pride of a nation brought up in Jose Marti’s idea that My Country Is Humanity, shall be awarded the prize their noble hearts deserve, or not; but it has been years since they won the recognition of the peoples blessed by their health work. The US government is not hiding its intention to enforce new and harsher aggressive measures against Cuba in the next few months. We state once again before the international community that our people, who take pride in their history and are committed to the ideals and achievements of the Revolution, shall resist and overcome. The attempts at imposing neocolonial domination on Our America by publicly declaring the present value of the Monroe Doctrine contravene the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“While the US government is ignoring the call to combine efforts to fight the pandemic and it withdraws from the WHO, Cuba, in response to requests made to it, and guided by the profound solidarity and humanistic vocation of its people, is expanding its cooperation by sending over 3 700 cooperation workers distributed in 46 medical brigades to 39 countries and territories hit by COVID-19. In this sense, we condemn the gangster blackmailing by the US to pressure the Pan-American Health Organization so as to make that regional agency a tool for its morbid aggression against our country. As usual, the force of truth shall do away with lies, and facts and protagonists shall go down in history as they should. Cuba's example shall prevail.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“We demand a cease of the hostility and slanderous campaign against the altruistic work by Cuba's international medical cooperation that, with much prestige and verifiable results, has contributed to saving hundreds of lives and lowering the impact of the disease in many countries. Prominent international figures and highly prestigious social organizations have acknowledged the humanistic work done by the “Henry Reeve” International Medical Brigade for Disaster Situations and Serious Epidemics and called for the Nobel Peace Prize to be given to them.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“So as to damage and demonize the Cuban Revolution and others it defines as adversaries, the US has been publishing spurious lists having no legitimacy by which it abrogates itself the right to impose unilateral coercive measures and unfounded qualifications on the world. Every week, that government issues statements against Cuba or imposes new restrictions. Paradoxically, however, it has refused to term as terrorist the attack that was carried out against the Cuban embassy in Washington on 30 April, 2020, when an individual armed with an assault rifle fired over 30 rounds against the diplomatic mission and later admitted to his intent to kill. We denounce the double standards of the US government in the fight against terror and demand a public condemnation of that brutal attack.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“We have been able to do it in spite of the harsh restrictions of the long economic, commercial and financial blockade being imposed by the US government, which has been brutally tightened in the last two years, even at these pandemic times, something that shows it is the essential component of the hostile US Cuba policy. The aggressiveness of the blockade has reached a qualitatively higher level that further asserts its role as the real and determining impediment to the managing of the economy and the development of our country. The US government has intensified in particular its harassment of Cuban financial transactions and, beginning in 2019, it has been adopting measures that violate international law to deprive the Cuban people of the possibility to buy fuels they need for their everyday activities and for their development.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“With the decade-long experience of facing terrible epidemics, some of which were provoked deliberately as part of the permanent war against our political project, we immediately implemented a series of measures based on our main capabilities and strengths, namely, a well structured socialist state that cares for the health of its citizens, a highly-skilled human capital and a society with much people's involvement in its decision-making and problem solving processes. The implementation of those measures, combined with the knowledge accrued for over 60 years of great efforts to create and expand a high-quality and universal health system, plus scientific research and development, has made it possible not only to preserve the right to health of all citizens, without exception, but also to be in a better position to face the pandemic.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Only the UN, with its world membership, has the required authority and reach to resume the just struggle to write off the uncollectable foreign debt which, aggravated by the social and economic effects of the pandemic, is threatening the survival of the peoples of the South. Mr. President, The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and the early signs that it would bring a pandemic did not catch Cuba off guard.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Studies by the International Labor Organization (ILO) say that over 305 million jobs have been lost and that more than 1.6 billion workers are having their livelihoods at stake. We cannot face COVID-19, hunger, unemployment and the growing economic and social inequalities between individuals and countries as unrelated phenomena. There is an urgency to implement integrated policies that prioritize human beings and not economic profits or political advantages. It would a crime to postpone decisions that are for yesterday and for today. It is imperative to promote solidarity and international cooperation to lessen the impact.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Unlike excluding neoliberalism, which puts aside and discards millions of human beings and condemns them to survive on the leftovers from the banquet of the richest one per cent, the COVID-19 virus does not discriminate between them, but its devastating economic and social effects shall be lethal among the most vulnerable and those with lower incomes, whether they live in the underdeveloped world or in the pockets of poverty of big industrial cities. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projections, the 690 million people who were going hungry in 2019 might be joined by a further 130 million as a result of the economic recession caused by the pandemic.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Due to its nefarious sequels, impressive death toll and damages to the world economy and the deterioration of social development levels, the spreading of the pandemic in the last few months brings anguish and despair to leaders and citizens in practically all nations. But the multidimensional crisis it has unleashed clearly shows the great mistake of the dehumanized policies fully imposed by the market dictatorship. Today, we are witnessing with sadness the disaster the world has been led to by the irrational and unsustainable production and consumption system of capitalism, decades of an unjust international order and the implementation of ruthless and rampant neoliberalism, which has widened inequalities and sacrificed the right of peoples to development.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“As stated by the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and Army General Raul Castro Ruz, and I quote: “The international community shall always count on Cuba's honest voice in the face of injustice, inequality, underdevelopment, discrimination and manipulation, and for the establishment of a more just and equitable international order which really centers on human beings, their dignity and wellbeing.” End of quote. Mr. President, Coming back to the seriousness of the present situation, which many blame only on the COVID-19 pandemic, I think it is essential to say that its impact is by far overflowing the health sphere.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Notwithstanding the dissatisfactions and the demands for change that, together with other states and millions of citizens in the world, we are presenting to the UN, the Cuban Revolution shall always uphold the existence of the Organization, to which we owe the little but indispensable multilateralism that is surviving imperial overbearance. More than once, at this very forum, Cuba has reiterated its willingness to cooperate with the democratization of the UN and the upholding of international cooperation, that can be saved only by it.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Today's world needs the UN just as the one where it came into being did. Something that is very special and profound has failed, as evidenced by the daily and permanent violation of the UN Charter principles, and by the ever- increasing use or threat of use of force in international relations. There is no way to sustain any longer, as if it were natural and unshakable, an unequal, unjust and anti-democratic International order where selfishness prevails over solidarity and the mean interests of a powerful minority over the legitimate aspirations of millions of people.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Along such line of action, which ignores the old principles of peaceful co-existence and respect of the right of others' to self-determination as the guarantee for peace, the Donald Trump administration it also manipulating, with subversive aims, cooperation in the sphere of democracy and human rights, while in its own territory there is an abundance of practically uncontrolled expressions of hatred, racism, police brutality and irregularities in the election system and as to the voting rights of citizens It is urgent to reform the UN. This powerful organization, which emerged after the loss of millions of lives in two world wars and as a result of a world understanding of the importance of dialogue, negotiation, cooperation and international law, must not postpone any further its updating and democratization.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Paradoxically, the country where the UN headquarters is located is also staying away from fundamental international treaties such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change; it rejects the nuclear agreement with Iran reached by consensus; it promotes trade wars; it ends its commitment with international disarmament control instruments; it militarizes cyberspace; it expands coercion and unilateral sanctions against those who do not bend to its designs and sponsors the forcible overthrow of sovereign governments through non conventional war methods.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“We are referring to a markedly aggressive and morally corrupt regime that despises and attacks multilateralism, uses financial blackmailing in its relations with UN system agencies and that, in a show of unprecedented overbearance, has withdrawn from the World Health Organization, UNESCO and the Human Rights Council.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Even close friends cannot recognize each other due to the masks that protect us from the contagion. Everything is changing. Like finding a solution to the pandemic, it is already urgent to democratize this indispensable Organization so that it effectively meets the needs and aspirations of all peoples. The sought-after right of humanity to live in peace and security, with justice and freedom, the basis for unity among nations, is constantly under threat. Over $1.9 trillion are being squandered today in a senseless arms race promoted by the aggressive and war-mongering policies of imperialism, whose leader is the present government of the US, which accounts for 38 per cent of the global military expenditure.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, A global pandemic has changed everyday life drastically. From one day to the next, millions of people get infected and thousands die even when their life expectancy was longer thanks to development. Hospital systems with high-level services have collapsed and the health structures of poor countries are affected by their chronic lack of capacity. Drastic quarantines are turning the most populated cities into deserted areas. Social life is non existent except in the digital networks. Theaters, discos, galleries and even schools are closed or being readjusted. Our borders have been closed, our economies are shrinking and our reserves are dwindling. Life is experiencing a radical redesigning of age-old ways and uncertainty is replacing certainty.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“I am moved to be speaking from the same rostrum from which Fidel spoke the truth so powerfully 58 years ago that it still resonates with the representatives of more than 190 nations who, rejecting extortion and pressure, year on year turn the voting screen a dignified green with lights approving our demand for an end to the embargo. I close with the hope that the noble aspirations shared by the majority of humankind may be realized before yet further generations take to this rostrum to demand the very same things we demand today and our historic predecessors did before us.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“Raúl Castro Ruz, said, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the United Nations: “The international community can always depend on Cuba to raise its honest voice against injustice, inequality, underdevelopment, discrimination and manipulation and for the establishment of a more equitable and fair international order that really focuses on the human being, his dignity and well-being.” (A/70/ PV.14, p.6) The Cuba on behalf of which I speak today is proud to carry the torch of that independent sovereign policy, which is bound by links of brotherhood and solidarity to the world’s poor, who produce all the world’s wealth but are condemned to live in poverty by an unjust world order under the cover of words like “democracy”, “freedom” and “human rights” — words which those in power have, in fact, emptied of all meaning.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)
“In this conviction, we have initiated a process of constitutional reform — a truly participatory democratic exercise with public discussion of the draft text which will later be submitted for approval by referendum. I am certain that there will be no changes in our strategic objectives and that the irrevocable nature of socialism will be reaffirmed. The principles of our foreign policy will remain unchanged. As the First Secretary of our Party, Mr.”
2018-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 73 (2018)