WASHINGTON, United States. – The influential American magazine Newsweek just published an article in which he assures that “Biden has put Cuba in the spotlight during the worst crisis since the Cold War between the United States and Russia.”
According to Tom Connor, the author of the article ―who gives the Cuban authorities ample space to respond to criticism from Washington―, the United States has opened a new political front against Cuba, accusing it of supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the abstain on motions condemning Moscow and amplify the Russian argument that the United States and its NATO allies helped set the scene for conflict.
“It should be noted that Cuba,” says Newsweek― did not join North Korea, Belarus, Syria and Russia in opposing the resolution presented at the United Nations.” On that occasion, 34 countries abstained and 141 condemned Russia.
Havana links the United States’ criticism of its position on the war in Ukraine with Washington’s commercial and financial embargo against the regime, and harshly denounces the US Embassy in Cuba for “regularly publishing messages of support for Ukraine, critics of Russia”. In some of the tweets from the embassy, it says Newsweek, “the Cuban government is accused of supporting Moscow in the conflict.” And although it is not mentioned in the article, the US Embassy has also disclosed the dramatic situation of hundreds of political prisoners on the island.
Newsweek it did report that “the Russian Embassy in Havana has also distributed its narrative of the war in Ukraine through tweets in which it explains that Russian troops are bravely carrying out what President Putin has characterized as a ‘special military operation’ to neutralize Ukraine militarily. and eliminate the forces of the extreme right, which he claims have hijacked Ukraine’s leadership.”
The island’s regime responds with its usual propaganda and diplomatic display, and recalls how Cuba provided medical assistance to sick Ukrainian children after the Chernobyl disaster.
Some historians, reading these statements, will remember the perverse logic of Fidel Castro when he supported the criminal Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (which the Czechs do not forget, just as the Ukrainians will not forget the support of Castro for Putin).
At the time of the collapse of the communist world, Prague represented Cuba – which had no diplomatic relations with the United States – in Washington. Shortly after, Václav Havel, the former Czech political prisoner and playwright, who was then president of his country, told me that when he found out he ordered the expulsion of the Castroist Cubans from the Czech Embassy in the US capital. The Havel government later obtained a strong denunciation of the Castro dictatorship at the United Nations in Geneva.
No one should be surprised if Ukraine manages in the future, with the support of its allies, to expel the Cuban dictatorship from the United Nations Human Rights Council. It is a management that is already being promoted by the Center for Free Cuba and that is supported by several democracies and international organizations. The Cuban Foreign Ministry, lamenting Moscow’s suspension of the Council a few days agoIn addition to blaming Washington, he said that after Russia’s suspension, they would try to do the same against other governments such as Cuba. Hopefully the foreign minister, who has been wrong so many times, is right in this case and manages to convince Raúl Castro to decree an amnesty for political prisoners, before several nations withdraw diplomats from Cuba in protest.
According to the article of Newsweekwhich must be studied very carefully in Havana, “a month before the invasion that began on February 24, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Moscow could respond to a new American military presence in Europe by increasing the Russian military presence in the territory of its allies in the Western Hemisphere”.
This is an obvious reference to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The failure of the talks between NATO and Russia, according to the magazine, “could result in a situation worse than the October Crisis of 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.”
At that time, as it became known later when Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs were published, Fidel Castro urged Moscow to use atomic bombs against the United States, saying that the Cuban people were willing to sacrifice themselves to free humanity once and for all. of Yankee imperialism.
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