Havana/ Brussels/“The European Union must analyze and rethink its relations with the Cuban regime,” said the opponent José Daniel Ferrer to 14ymedio After participating, this Tuesday, in a public hearing before the Human Rights Subcommission of the European Parliament.
The event addressed the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms in Cuba and both Ferrer and activist Rosa María Payá, founder of Cuba decides, intervened by telematics. The political expreasing hopes that his message has been “clear, precise and forceful” and helps the European Union to review the Agreement of Political Dialogue and Cooperation that it maintains with the Cuban authorities.
“You must take a more energetic position towards the main liberticide of the Americas,” Ferrer said 14ymedio. “We are talking about a regime that is the main rapist of human rights in the American continent and the ally, precisely, of the main enemies of freedom and democracy on the planet.” Havana, the opponent recalled, is allied “even from the Russia of Vladimir Putin, which invaded Ukraine.”
“This regime cannot continue receiving the treatment he has been receiving during the last years of the European Union,” insisted the dissident
“This regime cannot continue receiving the treatment he has been receiving during the last years of the European Union,” the dissident insisted to this newspaper, on a day when his home was also the subject of a strong police operation. However, Ferrer warned of ambivalences that mark European position against Havana.
“We have seen for years that the European Parliament ends up approving solidarity resolutions in favor of human rights in Cuba and favor of the liberation of political prisoners, but at the same time, we have seen the European Commission maintain the same relations and the same quite warm position, quite pale in the face to the Commission, which is the Executive Body of the Union.
At the audience, Ferrer said that Cuba “remains one of the nations where freedom of the press, expression and peaceful manifestation is less respected.” The opponent also argued that the country’s prisons “remind of concentration camps of Nazi Germany.”
“We need firmer policies towards the greatest enemy of democracy and human rights in the American continent, we need solidarity for those of us who fight to make Cuba a prosperous nation, friend of the European and West Union,” he concluded.
For more than a week, the headquarters of the UNPACU, located in the Altamira neighborhood, in Santiago de Cuba, has dawned besieged by state securityto prevent Ferrer from distributing food among hundreds of vulnerable people attending their home in search of something to eat and to receive medical care, from her wife, Dr. Nelva Ortega.
For his part, the deputy director for the Americas of the Human Rights Watch initiative, Juan Pappier, considered that “the European Parliament and the European external action service have a fundamental role to play, they must lead. We ask the Parliament that vigorously condemn the violations of human rights in Cuba and oppose the broad sanctions that harm the population.”
The leader of the project, who investigates and informs about abuses to vulnerable people in the world, explained during the audience, the limits that suffer from freedom of expression and press on the island
The leader of the project, who investigates and informs about abuses to vulnerable people in the world, explained during the audience, the limits suffered by freedom of expression and press on the island.
“According to data referring to February, Cuba registered 1,150 political prisoners, in house arrest or other forms of freedom guarded. In March, the release of 550 was negotiated after the intervention of the Vatican, but according to human rights groups only 200 were political prisoners,” he said.
The first vice president of the Inter -American Commission on Human Rights, Andrea Pochak, defined Cuba as a country with a “worrying context” that “continues to face structural human rights challenges that have origin in the absence of essential rights of any representative democracy.”
He warned of the absence of political pluralism, the prohibition of association for political purposes, the criminalization of “worrying” protests and patterns of social protest criminalization present in the country.
In his speech, Payá said that Cuba is going through a “deep” human rights crisis. “Hunger is the main complaint of citizenship. Health services are collapsed, cancer patients report not getting medicine, medical care is increasingly poor,” he lamented.
