By Susana Tesoro on December 10, 2023 from Havana
Seventy-five years have passed this December 10, since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established by the United Nations. One could ask the UN where are the rights of the thousands of children, women, of the Palestinian people, murdered, or those of so many Cubans who today suffer the scarcity of food and medicine due to the genocidal blockade of the United States.
Cuba, a small country with scarce material resources, has had Fidel Castro as the greatest defender of the fundamental rights of man and women on stages almost everywhere in the world.
Since 1953, in his self-defense speech at the trial for the assaults on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks, Fidel Castro made his tireless struggle for Human Rights very clear.
The policy to be followed in Fidel’s History Will Absolve Me speech, defines the rights of peasants, blacks, women, of all Cubans to an existence with full freedoms that had been denied to them in a society where the Law of the Funnel reigned: the wide cup for the Americans and their wealthy henchmen, and the narrow cup for the majority of the people.
On January 1, 1959, the doors opened for the illiterate, the landless peasants, the children without schools, and the sick without medical attention.
But three years later, the irreconcilable U.S. governments began their escalation from the Bay of Pigs aggression to besieging, persecuting and stopping any hint of economic development for Cuba.
On January 3, 1961, the President of the United States of America, Dwight D. Eisenhower, broke diplomatic relations with Cuba due to political and ideological differences, and ordered the closure of the U.S. embassy in Havana. On February 3, 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy officially ordered the economic and commercial blockade of Cuba, which prevails to this day, brutally isolating the island and generating severe violations of the essential rights of the population in terms of food, health and opportunities for a dignified life.
It is regrettable the attitude of our opponents, who spread throughout the world like a plague, have taken advantage of any crack to attack Fidel Castro and the current government of Cuba, calling them violators of Human Rights, when the exact opposite is true.
We are not going to focus on the very difficult situation in which the Cuban people live today, because we all know what the main cause is, which I will not mention. But if we make a quick balance, we will see the trajectory of Fidel Castro, and his fight for the people to enjoy, defend and enforce their rights.
The figure of Fidel Castro was not only a symbol in Cuba but also in the world, thanks to his actions in defense of the welfare and sovereignty of the island and its inhabitants. Despite being subjected to the iron blockade of the United States of America, Cuba managed to maintain its sovereignty, and it is indisputable that Fidel and the Cuban Revolution became an inspiration in the Latin American context of the 20th century. Fidel Castro’s challenge to the most powerful power turned the Revolution into a model of Latin American resistance as a symbol of justice and human rights.
The women in Cuba in 1959 were silenced housewives. The peasants were not taken into account, were neglected s rural slaves who could not even raise their voices. Illiteracy and ignorance reigned in the archipelago. The blacks were isolated in associations, spaces, where whites did not go.
The U.S. government commits in its own country: racism, police brutality, repressive policy against migrants, repression of all kinds, extrajudicial executions and the use of torture. But the UN does not speak out.
The Guantanamo prison, located in an area of illegally occupied Cuban territory, has been denounced before the whole world as an example of violation of human rights, and the handcuffed UN does nothing to eliminate such an outrage.
human beings with rights
That organization, mother of the much-trumpeted Charter of Human Rights, forgets that Fidel Castro was the architect of the 1961 Literacy Campaign, the redesign of the education system to improve the levels of education among a large part of the Cuban population that was illiterate in 1959, taking Cuba to first place in Latin America in literacy. Later, brigades of Cuban teachers taught thousands of illiterate people in Latin America to read and write, bringing teaching to indigenous languages such as Aimara.
From another angle, there is the provision of Cuban medical assistance to Latin America and other countries. The large number of highly trained medical personnel sent to various countries, as well as the creation in Cuba of the Latin American School of Medicine, which has trained and educated doctors for the poor around the world.
The participation of Cuban doctors in supporting various countries during the COVID-19 pandemic led voices from all over the world to call for the nomination of the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
The fruit of the successes of Cuban vaccines against COVID-19, and cancer, plus dozens of other new drugs, has flourished thanks to the seed deposited by Fidel Castro.
Fidel was a stubborn defender of multilateralism, a constant accuser of the unequal policies that cause hunger and misery on the planet, and an advocate of the fight against climate change. Fidel Castro faced an economic war for more than half a century against 12 U.S. administrations, defending Cuba’s right to sovereignty and self-determination, rejecting the economic, commercial and financial blockade.
In the words of former Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika: Fidel Castro had “the rare virtue of traveling into the future and then returning to tell the tale”.
It is widely known that he was visionary by nature, dodged complicated obstacles, faced challenges and mistakes, pointed to the most astute problems of the contemporary world and prophesied the consequences of a globalized and neoliberal world. Fidel in 2014, in one of his Reflections, mentioned the Jewish holocaust during World War II, the pain, the discrimination, the barbarism suffered by the Hebrew people, victims of German Nazism, of fascism in Europe, and pointed out that there was nothing more similar than what the Palestinian people suffered because of the criminal policies of U.S. imperialism and the powers of Western Europe in unabashed support of the colonialist, racist, Zionist State of Israel.
When Fidel signed his support for Palestine in that 2014 appeal he did so with the deep feelings of solidarity that accompanied him throughout his existence.
And although Fidel then denounced the “shameful and criminal war in the Gaza Strip, a piece of land where the population of what has remained of independent Palestine lives, until barely half a century ago” he foresaw what was to come.
It is truly appalling to see how almost a century has passed since those days when the hopeful world knew of the existence of the Declaration of Human Rights and felt protected. But Fidel Castro went to the future and saw the horror we are living today.
On September 26, 1960, in his speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations, Fidel stated that the enemies of disarmament and peace were: “those who want to maintain the colonies, those who want to maintain their monopolies, those who want to keep in their hands the oil of the Middle East, the natural resources of Latin America, Asia, Africa; and to defend them they need force …, they are like crows, he said, the monopolies feed on the corpses that wars bring us”.
Source: Cuba en Resumen