Washington, Jul 11 (Prensa Latina) Cuba does not sponsor terrorism but global well-being, said an article on the Peoples Dispatch website on Monday, which urges President Joe Biden to remove the island from that unilateral list of the United States.
Biden can eliminate this designation with a stroke of the pen, affirmed the text signed by the well-known American musician Roger Waters, the Indian historian, editor and journalist Vijay Prashad, and Manolo de los Santos, founder and co-director of The People’s Forum movement.
They warned that such inclusion «deeply harms the ability of the Cuban government and its people to carry out the basic functions of life.»
“Cuba has been -since 1959- the victim of acts of terrorism by the United States, including an attempted invasion in 1961 (Bay of Pigs) and repeated assassination attempts against its leaders (638 times against Fidel Castro), they argued.
In addition, the largest of the Antilles «has a long history of medical internationalism, with Cuban doctors and medicines being seen from Pakistan to Peru,» the authors added.
Cuba had not been on the list of state sponsors of terrorism since 2015, when President Barack Obama removed that country from the list, to which it was added for the first time in 1982 by then-President Ronald Reagan, they noted.
However, «in his last week in office, and days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Donald Trump included Cuba on the list again on January 12, 2021,» they emphasized.
There was no new evidence that anything had changed since 2015, showing that Trump’s actions were purely political, Waters, Prashad and de los Santos wrote.
They reiterated that Cuba has suffered in practice from the blockade from the very moment the revolution triumphed in that Caribbean nation on January 1, 1959 (although the unilateral siege of Washington was officially declared by John F. Kennedy on February 7, 1962).
They pointed out that since 1992, almost all the countries of the world -184 of 193 at the last count- have voted in the United Nations General Assembly to lift this policy of suffocation. “It is impressive to know that due to this blockade (…) companies refuse to sell Cuba raw materials, reagents, diagnostic kits, medicines and pharmaceutical devices, (…) for the operation of the excellent but stressed science and public health system of the island”, they expressed.
They reiterated that when Biden ran for president he said he would «reverse Trump’s toughest sanctions and go back to the policies of the Obama administration, but he hasn’t.»
The example of public health in Cuba, despite being a small island nation, should be exported to the whole world, they insisted.
"An Island on a Continent" 