Cuban FM Reiterates Will to Normalize Relations with USA

Bruno Rodriguez:  Since the blockade is a unilateral policy, it must stop unilaterally.

Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodriguez denounced at the United Nations the persistent tightening of the US economic, commercial and financial blockade on Cuba, especially its extraterritorial span.

On addressing the plenary session he said, that has been the picture over the past four years despite the 20 consecutive resolutions the General Assembly has approved urging to end such practices, adding that keep up the blockade is not of national interest of the US but rather harms the interest of its citizens and business circle, namely in times of economic crisis.

Why hurting the Constitutional, Civilian rights and the liberty of the US people preventing them from visiting the Island if they are free to go anywhere they choose to on Earth, even to the countries with which their homeland is at war?

He also wondered the reasons to renounce a new market of 11 million people to persist on wasting hundreds of billions collected to the common citizens in taxes to fund a futile and illegal anti-Cuba subversion.

Why hurting Washington’s relations with other states, including its allies, with extraterritorial regulations violatory of the international Laws?

“Since the blockade is a unilateral policy, it must stop unilaterally”, sentenced Rodriguez at the session that addressed The Necessity to End the USA Economic, Commercial and Financial Blockade on Cuba.

And explained that annulling this measure would prevent further discredit of the US official humanitarian policies that would help it quit its obstinate role of violator of the human rights of the Cuban people.

He stressed that Cuba has never orchestrated anti-US hostile actions nor has ever approved the arrangement of terrorist actions against the American people.

“None legitimate or moral motive justifies the continuity of this blockade anchored in the long past Cold War Era”, he stressed.

“It is just the weapon of a shrinking, isolated, violent and self-conceited minority whose election campaigns rest on this policy that overlooks the clamours of the majority and insist to challenge the determination of the Cuban people to decide its own destiny,” he stressed.

Rodriguez mentioned several examples serving as hard evidence of the multiple and many damages of the blockade “not just in the country but also against many of the governments here represented”.

During the Barack Obama Administration, the fines and sanctions round two billion 259,732 dollars and double the numbers of both terms of ex President George W. Bush.

The Cuban FM defined as massive and incalculable the human damage resulting from the US blockade and the sufferings, deprivation and difficulties that each family, girl, boy, women and men, the handicapped, female or male senior and the diseased have been through.

Because of its declared purpose and direct effects, the blockade Vs Cuba qualifies as genocidal and massive, flagrant and systematic violation of the human rights of entire peoples, he stressed.

Rodriguez reminds that the economic damages accumulated through the years along more than 50 years under the effects of the measure until the year 2011 have reached one billion 66,000 USD, “in rigurous and conservative calculus reliant on the depreciation of the dollar against Gold”.

In reminding of Obama’s recent re-election, Bruno Rodriguez stressed that the US head of state may now profit from the opportunity to launch anew his policy with Cuba, marking a distance from his ten predecessors in the Oval Office.

“It will be hard and will be dealing with tough adversities but the President enjoys Constitutional privileges to listen to the public opinion and ignite the needed dynamics via executive decisions without Congressional approval”.

“No doubt it would be a historic legacy”, he stressed.

Rodriguez reiterated on behalf of President Raul Castro “the strong will of the Cuban government to advance towards the normalization of relations with the United States of America, through respectful dialogue, free of preconditions, on reciprocal terms and equality of sovereignty, and without affecting in the least our independence and sovereignty.”

He equally reaffirmed to Washington an agenda to hold bilateral dialogue to advance the normalization of relations that includes lifting the economic, commercial and financial blockade.

A second item on this agenda would be excluding Cuba from the arbitrary and illegal list of terrorist states, annulling the Cuba Adjustment Law and Dry-Feet-Wet Feet policy and the financial reparation of economic and human damages.

Equally, returning Guantanamo Naval Base occupies today, the end of radio and Tv aggressions and stop financing internal subversion.

And as primary element, “freeing the Five Cuban antiterrorist from their cruel and unjust prison and withheld in this country (the US)”.

The later is an act of justice or, at least, a humanitarian solution “nurturing my people’s gratitude and similar government response”.

The Cuban Foreign Minister called the US government to negotiate cooperation agreements on areas of mutual interest, like fighting drug and human trafficking, and the complete regularization of emigration relations.

That would, include helping prevent and mitigate natural disaster aftermath, advance environment programs friendly to the environment and common seas and resume the bilateral talks that Washington suspended unilaterally on emigration and to restore mailing services.

Nonetheless, Cuba “will defend at any price its conquest, will persist in its ideals, will recover from the natural catastrophes” like that that recently hit Santiago de Cuba and the other east and central Cuban Provinces.