All the world consensus that the UN manages in terms of health, climate change, denouncing the genocide against Palestine, human rights… will be “wrong” as long as it does not suit the United States
Photo: EFE
Following the policy of breaking with any national or international institution considered as not convenient to the hegemonic interests of the United States, the current administration in Washington has taken another alarming step towards isolation and unilateralism.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to end U.S. participation in the UN Human Rights Council, and continue the suspension of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa).
“I have always felt that the UN has enormous potential, but it is not fulfilling it at the moment. For a long time it has been ineffective. There are high hopes for it, but, to be honest, it’s not well managed,” Trump said at the White House.
Will Scharf, an advisor to the president, in presenting the document for signature, asserted that the decision was made “in light of the numerous actions taken by various United Nations agencies that demonstrate a deep anti-U.S. bias.”
These actions accentuate the White House’s backtracking on its commitment to the UN, not only isolating the country from the concert of nations, but also undermining the vital work of these organizations in protecting the most vulnerable.
The fallacious accusation that the Human Rights Council “enables” countries like Iran, China and Cuba to “shield” themselves from criticism ignores the efforts of member states, including the aforementioned, to address human rights violations around the world.
Donald Trump attempts to justify such action with criticism of the ineffectiveness of the UN, which he accuses of being “anti-Israel”. This position, which is not new, reinforces the U.S. approach of a priori defense of Zionism and its complicity in crimes against the Palestinian people.
In that sense, the suspension of funds to Unrwa, a vital agency for Palestinian refugees, aggravates the already precarious humanitarian crisis in the region.
It should be clarified that Trump’s decree goes beyond the exit from the Human Rights Council, he also intends to review Washington’s participation in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco).
What else to expect from one who intends to eliminate the Department of Education in his own country?
These measures, added to the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement, evidence a clear tendency to ignore international commitments and dismantle the multilateral system built after World War II.
Prison for “illegals” at illegal base on foreign soil
U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay could become immigration detention center
Once again, because of a White House decision, there will be a hell for prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Photo: CNN
“In an act of brutality, the new U.S. government announces the imprisonment, at the Guantánamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory, of thousands of migrants that it is forcibly expelling, who will be placed next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention”.
The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, wrote in X after learning that the Guantánamo Naval Base – which, in addition to being illegal, harbors unimaginable torture and violations of all kinds against human rights – will now also be a detention center for some 30,000 immigrants, as announced by President Donald Trump.
Although none of his controversial decisions have caused too much astonishment (coming from where they come from), it is still outrageous that he now intends to turn the territory -which, as the whole world knows, does not belong to them- into part of his strategy to remove from the United States thousands of people who have set foot in that country in search of the so-called American dream.
At the signing ceremony of the Laken Riley Act, Trump spoke about an executive order for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the facility for such purposes, without elaborating too much on the procedure by which the transfer will be executed.
Since his ascension, for the second time, to the presidential chair, the multimillionaire, known for his discriminatory anti-immigrant behavior, has taken the harshest measures in favor of a “cleansing”, which will have terrible consequences, even for unborn children.
In the midst of this context, the new announcement comes to light, which once again puts the Guantánamo Naval Base in the spotlight of international opinion. Many horrors have been committed there, from the kidnapping and murder of Cuban citizens, to serving as a crime and torture laboratory, under the justification of the war against terrorism. So far, the attempts, announcements and promises to close the prison located on the base have remained only in words and, evidently, it will not be now that they will do it.
What is certain is that, under the political-electoral pretext of a “cleansing of illegal people who have invaded the soil that does not belong to them”, the champions of “freedom and human rights” have found a way out of the crisis they are creating for themselves, by transferring thousands of their deportees to that corner of Cuban land that the U.S. has usurped, in its shameless condition as an “illegal foreign government that has invaded the soil that does not belong to it”.
Floral offerings by Raul and Diaz-Canel were placed where the remains of the Apostle rest
Photo: Luis Alberto Portuondo
Santiago de Cuba -Santiagueros of all ages and sectors -representing millions of Cubans and friends from the rest of the world- came to Santiago de Cuba to witness the political act and the military ceremony in commemoration of the 172nd anniversary of his birth, at the Santa Ifigenia Patrimonial Cemetery, in the Hero City.
Floral offerings on behalf of Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, leader of the Cuban Revolution; of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez; of the president of the National Assembly of People’s Power, Esteban Lazo Hernández; and one on behalf of the Cuban people, were placed at the funeral monument.
In tune with the Master’s doctrines, it was ratified “the Latin Americanist and anti-imperialist character of the Cuban Revolution, and its marked commitment with all and for the good of all”, expressed Adriana Alvarez Legrá, president of the Organization of José Martí Pioneers in the territory.
Participating in the ceremony were members of the Central Committee of the Party, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the political organization, and Ernesto Santiesteban Velázquez, head of the Department for the Attention to the ujc and the mass organizations of the Party.
ARTILLERY SALVOS IN HONOR OF THE TEACHER
In the Santa Ifigenia Patrimonial Cemetery, in Santiago de Cuba, and in the San Carlos de La Cabaña Fortress, in Havana, around 12 noon, artillery salute ceremonies were held in honor of the 172nd anniversary of the birth of the Apostle.
The salute was a sign of the strength of the people and celebrated the immortal legacy of the most universal Cuban, inspiration to continue the struggle for justice and freedom.
We are in the hour of the ovens and, as Martí says, in it we must only see the light
Work by José Miguel Pérez, taken from La Jiribilla.
One more year of the Revolution has begun and the Cuban people are highlighting their heroism in the midst of difficulties and shortages caused, in the first instance, by the giant of the seven leagues, whose commercial, economic and financial blockade has become a merciless aggression that limits and obstructs the development of the country. Added to this are the losses caused by natural disasters, as well as the consequences of mistakes made by ourselves in our journey along the hard and challenging road that means the construction of socialism.
We continue to bet on the alternative of a model that promulgates anti-values such as individualism, selfishness, the exaltation of the material, and the consumption of the most degrading products of the human condition. We continue to choose socialism and swim against the current to defeat in Cuba all vestiges of capitalism.
In the midst of an alarming crisis, the terrible drama of post-modernity and neo-liberal globalization, the de-ideologization and the cracking of a socialist conscience (circumstances and powerful forces directly threaten it), it is the duty of Cuban revolutionaries to sow ideas, to sow conscience, to act with the example and ethics of the Revolution, strengthening the socialist ideology. It is essential, above all, in the midst of the humanistic chaos we live in, in which (media and social networks impact aside), the banal, the ethically reprehensible, and the deliberate and irresponsible consumption of contents that destroy the best of the human being, that manipulate and dominate his mind and, worst of all, alienate him, prevail.
I believe it is very necessary to return to José Martí’s pedagogical testament (his last letter to María Mantilla, in April 1895): “Much store, little soul. He who has much inside, needs little outside. He who carries much outside, has little inside, and wants to conceal the little. He who feels his beauty, the inner beauty, does not look outside for borrowed beauty: he knows he is beautiful, and beauty casts light.”
Cuba is being mercilessly attacked. The media campaigns, the offensive memes, the false news, the fascist persecution of patriots and revolutionaries, the dismantling of our true history, and the cultural attack on our people to fracture our national identity, are just a sample of the criminal rampage of Yankee imperialism.
And there are those who cry out for death and destruction. This is not a confrontation of ideas, of thought, in which despite the discrepancies -these, even welcome, if they go hand in hand with an ethical and decent posture- there are things so sacred that not even in the worst of the worst of the assumptions one imagines that they will be sullied.
On occasions they have dared to offend the Apostle of Independence. One does not violate what means so much to the soul of the Homeland. One does not stain the soul of the Homeland. To offend Martí and the symbolic construction of this people, which is indeed heroic and has known how to choose its path, is an absolutely despicable act. What the people want endures in Cuba; what a selfish and immoral group has always fallen, has always fallen.
José Martí would never have served them to legitimize such behaviors; José Martí did not share with treason, with those who hate and undo. A man of integrity and integrity would never approve of servility, neo annexationist positions. He fought against annexation, he warned of the danger of submission to the Yankee empire. Martí did good, he still does, his policy was always virtuous, his choice was to cast his lot with the poor of the earth.
REDEEMING LIGHT
However, let us not think that the real confrontation is against those who act in this way. It is others who are thinking about how to destroy Cuba, how to put an end to the Revolution and socialism, how to bury our identity. A war is being waged against us, undermining the most genuine bases of our revolutionary process is their key; undermining us from within, attacking our symbolic space, making us believe that the solution to our problems is there, on the other side.
There is a very clear plan: to divide us, to cut off our conscience, to strip us of our critical capacity, to make us selfish and, in the end, to kill what sustains us, what makes us feel, what makes us live in spite of the merciless imperialist hostility.
It is up to us to unite, not to leave these attacks unchallenged is a matter of principle. Let us remember that thought is the greatest war waged against us, and it is necessary to win it with thought, from the ethical height of Martí and Fidel. As the Master expressed in a letter to Gonzalo and Benjamin: “They are beating us with a winding tongue: let us close the way to a better language, the beautiful one…”.
We have a homeland, and those who yearn to defend their homeland will see the redeeming and emancipating light of those who love and found. These are times of definitions. The struggle is for life, to keep safe the freedom and sovereignty achieved on January 1st, 1959, to defend the patriotic ideal that has accompanied us historically, to continue transforming the country from the authentic creation and with the premise that Cuba is and will always be socialist and anti-imperialist.
We are in the hour of the ovens, and as Martí tells us, only the light is to be seen in it. The historical moment we are living is a boiling point, these are times to go to bed with our weapons as a pillow and not with a handkerchief on our heads, because there are very sacred things to defend.
66 years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, we are living a defining moment. To take sides by living the Revolution of dignity and for the decorum of man, in the face of the war that is being waged against us, becomes an essential step of every revolutionary, of every patriot. It is a generational duty that never dies, because it represents the feeling that covers our actions in the midst of such dramatic and difficult circumstances. It is the love for the homeland, a continuous vigil that provokes us to overcome the possible and to create, from the heroism that does not disdain the everyday.
This is one of the keys to ensure a Revolution such as the one we keep alive in Cuba: to make the beautiful the everyday, that is patriotism, an endearing value of the sons and daughters of the Homeland. It is necessary to decipher the keys to being anti-imperialist, to assume a culture, because this is a cultural war, of resistance and critical assimilation of the historical moment; so that, with the theoretical tools and an ideological platform capable of overcoming the hegemony of an unsustainable system such as capitalism, to change what must be changed, to bring about change, to bring about change in the world.nsformar la realidad que vivimos, desde la lealtad reflexiva y la asunción de códigos comunicacionales contrahegemónicos y emancipatorios.
As José Martí bequeathed us in one of his speeches commemorating October 10th: “It seems to me that I see crossing, at roll call, a choleric and sublime shadow, the shadow of the star in the hat; and my duty, as long as I have feet left, the duty of all of us, as long as we have feet left, is to stand up and say: ¡presente!
