Declaration of the National Assembly of People’s Power on death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo
News from Cuba | Saturday, 13 March 2010
In the aftermath of a campaign orchestrated essentially by powerful European media companies, which have viciously attacked Cuba, and following a sullied debate, the European Parliament has just passed a condemnation resolution against our country manipulating sentiments, distorting facts, deceiving people and obscuring reality.
The pretext has been the death of an inmate first punished for common crimes and then manipulated by US interests and the mercenaries at its service. This man refused to eat despite all warnings and the intervention of Cuban medical specialists.
This unfortunate event cannot be used to condemn Cuba under the allegation that his death could have prevented. If there is an area in which our country does not need to defend itself with words, because reality is undisputable, that is in its struggle for human life and not only for those born in Cuba but elsewhere, too. The presence of Cuban doctors in Haiti for eleven years prior to the earthquake of last January, practically ignored by the mainstream press, is but an example of this.
A great cynicism stands behind that condemnation, for countless lives, especially of children, have been lost in the poor nations due to the decision of the rich countries represented at the European Parliament to avoid honoring their commitments to development aid. Everyone knew that such a decision was a massive death sentence, yet they chose to preserve the level of wastage and ostentation of an eventually suicidal consumerism.
Cubans find it offensive this attempt at teaching us lessons as in Europe immigrants and the unemployed are the victims of repression while here, in neighbors’ meetings --freely and without intermediaries-- our people put up their candidates to the municipal elections.
Those who were involved in and/or allowed the air smuggling of detainees, the establishment of illegal prisons and the tortures lack the morality to pass judgment on a brutally blockaded and harassed people.
Such a discriminatory and selective condemnation can only result from the failure of a policy that has unsuccessfully tried to submit a heroic people. Neither the Helms-Burton Act nor the European Common Position, --both approved the same year, under similar circumstances and with equal purpose, and both harmful to our sovereignty and national dignity-have any future, since the Cubans reject impositions, intolerance and pressure in the development of international relations.
National Assembly of People’s Power of the Republic of Cuba
March 11, 2010
- Salim Lamrani writes about media coverage of events
- Cuban government statement regreting death of hunger striker
