Next Friday will be Human Rights Day, and Cuba has reason to celebrate. Of course there are challenges in this area (there will always be in the context of a dynamic society), but there are also realizations. Some opponents of the Revolution try to capitalize on the date to use it in the propaganda campaigns of their projects. They will say, as they say every year, that Cuba is a country in which human rights are customarily violated. They look where they are directed. They repeat what they are told. It is a biased and interested view.
But Cuba, a country besieged for decades, has a record of respect for human rights that in many aspects could become a reference for the governments and sectors that revile it. Starting precisely with the empire that imposes the most extensive blockade against an entire people. The double standard of that government is amazing: it punishes alleged violations of human rights with the greatest act of disrespect for those rights. The economic, financial and commercial blockade of the United States against Cuba is the greatest assault on the human rights of Cubans. There is no possible justification for this procedure.
Reducing the wide spectrum of implications of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to a controversial and perfectly debatable vision of a few articles is a strategy time and again articulated by certain sectors of power. The claim is to disqualify and erode projects that do not agree with their interests. Not only Cuba has been a victim of these policies.
It would be better for the United States government to review its own record on this matter. There is too little morale to set standards.
But in any case, Cuba has the right to debate its own model without external pressure. It has to be a debate among Cubans, whose limits are marked by the unanimous decision to preserve sovereignty and national dignity.
Much more can be done here to promote full respect for human rights. And it is done. A revolutionary new Family Code is now being debated. All rights for all: it is the slogan of those who support it. The idea is to assume human rights in their broadest and most comprehensive conception. That’s what it’s all about.
