By Sergio Martinez Gonzalez.
Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba in Antigua and Barbuda
The current US Secretary of State, “Pinocchio” – sorry, several children have rightly warned me that Pinocchio at the end of the children’s story learns his lesson and manages to become a good boy. This is not the case with Mr. Marco Rubio, who has no limits in showing his obsessive hatred towards Cuba and its noble people. Once again he resorts to unsustainable lies and slander, this time to try to affect one of the programs with the greatest human and solidarity content carried out by the Cuban Revolution: the medical collaboration program. For this purpose, the Secretary of State announced new measures aimed at punishing with the suspension of entry visas to the US, any person or government official from Cuba or third countries who in one way or another are linked to or have approved these collaboration programs.
Attempts to try to prevent Cuba from carrying out its solidarity vocation are not new. Since the arrival of the first Trump Administration, efforts and actions to try to affect Cuba’s medical cooperation agreements with third countries in every possible way have intensified to levels never seen before. At that stage, Marco Rubio, in his capacity as senator, along with other defenders of the policy of total economic asphyxiation against the Cuban people, played a relevant role in getting the US Government to classify the medical cooperation programs as human trafficking and slave labor, and thus include Cuba in one of its many spurious lists, in this case, the one referring to human trafficking. Let us remember how in 2020, in the midst of the complex health situation imposed by the COVID 19 pandemic on our countries, the then national security advisor for Latin America, Claver-Carone (recently appointed by President Trump as special envoy for the region), exerted pressure and threats of all kinds on the then government of Panama, to try to prevent Cuban doctors from traveling to that country to help Panamanian brothers face the tearrible Pandemic.
Despite being a small island developing state, Cuba has always been determined to continue its traditional vocation of providing solidarity to the neediest peoples, without conditions and with absolute respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of each nation. For more than 6 decades, around 605,698 Cuban health workers have collaborated in 165 countries in all latitudes and continents of the world. We remember the well-known and beautiful “Operation Miracle”, which restored vision and with it useful life to people in 35 countries in America and Africa: more than three million human beings who saw the light again with this program”; the participation of 265 Cuban professionals in the fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa as an example of the bravery of our army of white coats who did not hesitate to lend their support to save lives in that sister country on the African continent. With the scourge of the COVID pandemic, 58 brigades of doctors, nurses and health technicians belonging to the Henry Reeve contingent provided their solidarity support to more than 42 countries.
Today, Cuba has collaboration agreements in the area of public health with 57 countries, the vast majority of which are countries in the so-called South, where some 22,400 collaborators work, 54% of them women. Could it be that the Secretary of State, in his schizophrenic anti-Cuban obsession, intends to apply sanctions against governments in almost a quarter of the planet, including some considered allies of the United States? How is it possible to have such cruelty, threatening governments of developing countries with draconian punitive measures, to force them to accept Washington’s designs at the expense of affecting the sacred right to health of their people? For Marco Rubio, it does not matter that his measures could deprive millions of human beings around the world of basic health services that Cuban collaborators provide today.
The United States and its current Secretary of State may continue to apply their genocidal economic warfare measures to try to deprive the Cuban people of the most basic goods and services and significantly affect their standard of living. But they will never be able to deprive them of the humanistic feelings and values formed during these six decades of Revolution. Mr. Secretary of State, learn once and for all that solidarity can never be blocked.
