By Orlando Oramas León on May 4, 2022
photo: Yaimi Ravelo
The United States, which sets itself up as judge, jury and executioner on the issue of Human Rights at a global level, intends to reaffirm such an exercise at the IX Summit of the Americas, to be held from June 8 to 10 in the Californian city of Los Angeles.
And this is another reason why, in advance, the event, which should be hemispheric, will turn out to be another invitation for disunity and exclusion, such as that sought by Washington with respect to Cuba and Venezuela.
Not in vain, the current efforts of President Joe Biden’s administration is to try to pump oxygen into the role of the Organization of American States (OAS), in which Cuba is not a member and from which Nicaragua has already left, in a prelude to the announced departure of Bolivarian Venezuela.
Hence the denunciation made by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez of such maneuvers, in what he described as shady negotiations in the preparations for the forum in Los Angeles. Bruno criticized the determination of the United States to impose the OAS as the certifier of all elections taking place in the region.
This is the same OAS that gave its seal of approval to the coup d’état that overthrew the constitutionally elected president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, in 2019. While claiming to be Pan-American the OAS was complicit in the same procedure against the government of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, taken at gunpoint from his bed and put on a plane to Costa Rica in 2009.
The OAS did not apply its so-called Democratic Charter when Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was ousted; nor did it intervene during the judicial witch hunt faced by the former president of that country, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.
What can we say about the OAS’s behavior against Cuba and its complicit silence in the face of the brutal blockade that for more than six decades has been imposed on Cuba, accumulating until mid-2021, damages totaling 150.41 billion dollars at current prices?
The figure hides a whole barbarism in terms of human rights, because behind the numbers are the intentions of crushing Cubans through hunger, disease and hardships of all kinds. It is not for nothing that Cuba qualifies the U.S. blockade, on the basis of recognized international conventions and rights, as an act of genocide.
But the OAS is silent on the matter, even when on 29 occasions the UN General Assembly, the highest world body, rejects this policy of Washington annually with overwhelming votes.
The ineffectiveness of the OAS, or what a Cuban foreign minister defined as a ministry of colonies, was made public in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It was notorious that right-wing governments, including the United States itself, registered record numbers of deaths and cases due to disastrous policies of neglect, as shown most graphically in those Dantesque images of corpses in the streets of Guayaquil or the mass graves opened in Brazil.
It was in these same times when the White House took advantage of the pandemic to do as much damage as possible to Cuba and Venezuela, with the complicity of its satellites grouped in the OAS.
Never the less, while this was happening, Cuba sent 58 health brigades of the Henry Reeve International Contingent to 41 countries and territories, among them Haiti and others that are part of the Organization of American States.
The largest island of the Antilles offered its vaccines to the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and sent them for use in Nicaragua, Venezuela, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Syria, Iran, Vietnam and the Saharawi Arab Republic.
The OAS was not needed for that. Nor was it necessary to face, with exclusions, a hemispheric health strategy with a view to 2030, as it is intended to be adopted at the Los Angeles summit.
It would be necessary to ask the millions of Latin Americans, and also Americans, for whom access to health is not a human right.
https://cubaenresumen.org/2022/05/02/la-oea-cuba-y-la-cumbre-de-las-americas/
Source: Cuba en Resumen