On Cuban soil, there are over 600 prisoners who are denied any semblance of human rights by their captors. They have been subjected to unlimited physical and psychological abuse and denied the right to see a lawyer, family member or anyone else for years on end.

They are imprisoned not by Cuba, but by the United States, at the Guantánamo naval base.

After the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, hundreds of men and boys as young as 12 were rounded up and shipped, blindfolded and bound, halfway around the world to Guantánamo. There they are warehoused in open-air cages, exposed to mosquitoes and the scorching sun, and denied all due process and protection under the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war.

Now Cuba has intervened on the prisoners' behalf to demand justice.

In mid-April Cuba introduced a resolution to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, calling for an investigation of conditions in the US military prison and an end to the violation of the prisoners' rights. Cuba's resolution on the Guantánamo prison was announced minutes after a US-sponsored anti-Cuba resolution passed the UNHRC by the narrowest of margins.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque announced the Guantánamo resolution, saying: "The international community has a right to know what is happening there."

Midway through this year's UNHRC six-week session, a US-engineered resolution criticizing Cuba was narrowly approved, 22 to 21 with 10 abstentions. That vote came after several weeks of intense pressure from US representatives who threatened states with denial of foreign aid, political isolation, and worse.

The Human Rights Commission's 53 member states meet in Geneva each spring to discuss, vote and take action on human rights issues around the world. As with many international forums under the US and other Western powers' domination, the UNHRC distorts the phrase "human rights," using it as a weapon to try to bludgeon socialist and other independent countries into submission, or to establish pretexts for further aggression.

Nothing could better expose the utter hypocrisy of Washington's "human rights policy" than the anti-Cuba vote at the UNHRC.

This year, Washington pressured Honduras to "sponsor" the US-authored resolution against Cuba, and arm-twisted dependent countries in Latin America to support the campaign. Among those voting for the resolution were the governments of countries with some of the most atrocious records of military and death-squad repression, including Peru, Chile and Guatemala.

Guatemala condemning Cuba for human rights violations! In a half-century of genocidal repression after the US coup in 1954, a succession of Pentagon-supplied military regimes slaughtered more than 250,000 indigenous Guatemalans.

The sponsor of the anti-Cuba resolution, Honduras, had its own death squads when John Negroponte, currently US ambassador to the United Nations and soon to be proconsul in Iraq, served in the same role in Honduras in the 1980s. Negroponte was appointed as ambassador to Honduras to help organize the infamous Contra death squads that terrorized the Nicaraguan people after the Sandinista Revolution of 1978.

The 10-year US/Contra war against one of the world's poorest countries killed more than 50,000 Nicaraguans in a country of 2 million.

Cuba, with a very low infant mortality rate of six per 1,000 live births, universal and free health care, no homelessness, is condemned -but no resolution is passed against the United States for killing thousands of Iraqi people and illegally occupying the country.

Even its most vitriolic critics cannot claim a shred of evidence that any death squads exist in Cuba.

US imperialism has held the seven square miles on Cuba's south-eastern end since 1898, after the United States invaded Cuba just as Cuba was about to win its independence from Spain.

The United States forcibly added the ignominious Platt amendment to Cuba's new constitution in 1902 in "exchange" for the US military's leaving the island. The amendment allowed US intervention at any time, plus the free establishment of US military bases to fuel ships.

A revolutionary struggle of the Cuban masses ousted dictator Gerardo Machado in 1933 and threw out the Platt amendment in 1934.

But the United States has refused for the 70 years since to leave Guantánamo, flagrantly violating Cuba's territorial sovereignty.

Cuba's revolutionary government has maintained a non-confrontational approach toward this violation, stating that it cannot engage in a struggle at this critical time when US imperialism could use any pretext to attack Cuba.