As it has been systematically happening since 1988, a draft resolution condemning Cuba for supposed human rights violations is being examined, among many other documents being considered. The only news is that, proceeding in a different way from past sessions, the imperialist government of the United States has not found a flunky country willing to vicariously present the draft resolution. It was an artifice to demonstrate the “international community concerns” with the issue of human rights in Cuba and to show that it was not a political and ideological matter connected to the United States’ interests. This time, the draft resolution was presented by the United States itself. That already represents a political and moral defeat, revealing the existence of a new political environment in the world with repercussions in the multilateral forums and in the Commission on human rights itself. The number of countries that react to this discriminating, authoritarian and politically driven practice of treating the issue of human rights in a selective and directed way is increasing. The World’s progressive forces must mobilize the democratic conscience so that those repercussions reach the votes of the governments represented in the commission.
The United States’ proposal is empty of arguments. It simply alludes to texts that have been successively presented since 1988. The goal is to stigmatize Cuba as a country where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not taken into account.

News from Geneva tells that the United States is exerting strong pressure on the other 52 member countries of the Commission on Human Rights in order to approve the anti-Cuban resolution. According to a news article by Orlando Leon, special envoy of the Prensa Latina agency, almost fifty people take part in the United States’ delegation. Those are open as well as backstage pressures. There is even threatening, blackmailing and attempts at buying consciences. Measuring the pressure and aware of the political difficulties of gathering forces in favor of the anti-Cuban resolution, Washington’s representatives have been saying that they “recognize that some countries get in a difficult position” when it comes to vote a resolution on specific countries. Therefore, “if a country whishes to remain neutral about a determined resolution, we should encourage it to abstain instead of voting nay”.

There is not a single sign of honesty when the USA says that they are concerned about human rights. There is also no interest in cooperating on the issue within the scope of UN’s Commission on Human Rights. The Cuban delegation has presented nine draft resolutions related to the defense of human rights. The USA and its allies turn a blind eye to and ignore the Cuban government’s gesture. It is also ignored that, in 1988, Cuba invited and was visited by a Special Mission of the Commission on Human Rights integrated by its president and representatives of all geographic regions of the country. In 1989 the Commission thanked the government and the Cuban people for the collaboration given to the mission. Such fact is also omitted in the anti-Cuban text presented by Washington at the present session.

In reality, the North-American imperialism’s scope is strictly political and has aggressive purposes. The United States presents such draft resolutions in the Commission on Human Rights with the main purpose of creating an excuse to “justify” the continuity of the economic, commercial and financial blockade that imposed on Cuba, as well as an infinity of hostile acts such as the ones that they have been practicing for four and a half decades.
The United States nourishes annexionist and colonialist purposes towards Cuba. It has never hidden the fact that it does not accept the validity of an independent, sovereign, democratic and popular, socialist and revolutionary regime only a few miles away from its territory and in a region viewed as an area of its exclusive influence. Smashing the Cuban revolution is an obsession of the United States’. Even more strongly now, when an ultra-conservative aggressive group that intends to occupy and rule the world by military means is in charge in the United States. The validity, consolidation and deepening of the socialist revolution is, from the beginning, objectively antagonist to such purposes and postures. The decision of attacking Cuba, of changing the regime by all means, including military ones, is consubstantiate in a report by the so-called “Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba”, approved by Bush in May 6th, 2004, in which political, administrative and economic measures for after the “regime change” in Cuba are designed.

That is why we say that a struggle of conceptions is taking place in the Geneva Session, in which the international community, the democratic countries and the nations that fight for their sovereignty and for a fair, democratic and multilateral international order cannot be mistaken. To vote in favor or to abstain objectively, even if against the will of the government that pronounced such a vote, means to rehabilitate Bush’s imperialist government designs in the matter, helping to perpetrate the present state of things where the greatest practitioners of crimes against humankind arrogate the right to defile as criminals those who fight for the elementary right – recognized in the United Nation’s Chart – to self-determination, which implies the right to make sovereign decisions about the political and institutional organization.

United Nation’s political and moral authority has been systematically corroded and powdered because its recent trajectory oscillates between the demonstration of impotence before the systematic violations of the international law by the United States and its use as a tool, equivalent to submission, by means of that superpower’s machinations. The United Nations can no longer allow the slander of its authority and honorability, for this is what it will be all about if the Commission on Human Rights condemns Cuba, while turning a blind eye to the hideous acts practiced by Bush’s government in the prison-hells of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

The political struggle that is in progress at the Commission on Human Rights gathered in Geneva also concerns us, as a sovereign nation living an unique moment of development in democracy and the exercise of an independent foreign policy, results of the installation of president Lula progressive government, in 2003. Twice now, has our diplomacy decided for the easy and inertial position of abstention. If such a move was not justifiable before, now it is even less so, when the number of South-American countries moving away from Washington’s tutelage both on that and other issues is increasing.

We have no doubts that president Lula’s government has been sympathetic to Cuba, besides being an active protagonist in the struggle for a sovereign integration of Latin America. We also do not have any doubts when we say that voting against the anti-Cuban resolution is the only position coherent with the principles of the foreign policy of a country that intends to affirm itself as a progressive nation in the present world. Bilateral relations between Brazil and the United States are complex, marked by much interdependence in commercial, economic, financial and cultural fields in such a way that they can absorb, without any commotion, the taking of markedly distinct stands in any issue that Brazil deems necessary. The political relations with the progressive movement are of a diverse nature both internally and externally.

In order to grow strong, they need the constant and generous feeding of political gestures of solidarity and signs that in the struggle between the warlord’s barbarism and the forces of democracy, progress and peace, Lula’s new Brazil takes a side. In the name of this option, the progressive forces have the legitimate expectation that Brazil shall vote against the anti-Cuban resolution proposed by the United States.