CubaMinrex. Sitio del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Cuba

Cuba’s Truths

CUBA, January 23, 2012. Over the last few days, the media and representatives of some governments traditionally committed to anti-Cuban subversion have unleashed a new campaign of accusations, unscrupulously taking advantage of a sad fact —the death of an ordinary prisoner— and turning it into a news event with international repercussions. This degree of manipulation perhaps only happens when Cuba is involved.

The method used is the same as always: incessant but fruitless attempts to demonize Cuba, in this case, through the deliberate manipulation of an incident that, unlike in other countries, is completely unusual here.

This so-called political prisoner was serving a four-year sentence after undergoing a fair legal process (according to the law and during which he was at liberty) for savagely beating his wife in public, assaulting police officers and violently resisting arrest.

This individual died from multiple organ failure due to an acute respiratory infection despite having received the proper medical attention, including specialized treatment at the intensive care ward of Santiago de Cuba’s main hospital facility.

Why did some Spanish authorities and members of the European Union rush to condemn Cuba without even trying to gather any information regarding the incident? Why do they always use lies and jump to conclusions when Cuba is involved? Why, in addition to lying, do they censor the truth? Why is the voice and truth about Cuba openly denied the smallest space in the international media?

They are acting both cynically and hypocritically. How would they describe the recent police brutality in Spain and in a large part of "educated and civilized" Europe against the Indignados movement?

Why has no one worried about the dramatic overcrowding in Spanish jails where immigrants represent more than 35% of the prison population according to the most recent report by the ACAIP prison union, dated April 3, 2010?

Why has no investigation been made into the July 2011 death of Tohuami Hamdaoui in the Spanish prison of Teruel? Tohuami Hamdaoui was an ordinary prisoner of Moroccan origin who died after a hunger strike of several months. Who has spoken about the fact that he always insisted he was innocent?

Has the Chilean spokesperson, who slanders Cuba by asserting that the deceased was a political dissident on his 50th day of a hunger strike, lost his memory and all sense of reality? He must still remember his days as a student leader linked to Pinochet’s troops, who massacred Chileans and brought in a reign of disappearances and torture throughout the Southern Cone via the infamous Plan Condor. The same Chilean spokesperson has made no statements about the brutal repression of Chilean students peacefully demonstrating in support of the human right to universal and free education. Perhaps he is one of those proponents of relabeling the Pinochet dictatorship as a “military regime” in school textbooks? Has he made any statement regarding the repressive and arbitrary anti-terrorist law implemented against Mapuche prisoners on hunger strike?

Of course this latest slander campaign against Cuba would not be complete without the complicity of the United States government, the main instigator of efforts to discredit Cuba in order to justify its policy of hostility and subversion and its economic, political and media blockade of Cuba.

The hypocrisy of spokespersons for the United States —a country with a poor human rights record at home and abroad— is staggering. The UN Human Rights Council has acknowledged daily serious violations in this country in the area of: women’s rights, the treatment of persons, racial and ethnic discrimination, inhumane prison conditions, inmate neglect, a differentiated racial standard and frequent judicial errors in imposing capital punishment, the execution of minors and the mentally ill, violations in the immigration detention system, deaths along the militarized southern border, atrocious acts against human dignity, and the killing of innocent civilians by US army troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries, not to mention arbitrary detentions and acts of torture perpetrated in the illegally-occupied Guantanamo Naval Base.

Hardly known in the outside world, in November 2011 in the United States, three people died during a mass hunger strike in a prison in California. According to the testimonies of prisoners housed in adjacent cells, the guards did not offer them any assistance, and even deliberately ignored their cries for help, unlike the abusive practice of subjecting strikers to forced feeding.

Weeks earlier, the African American Troy Davis had been executed despite the copious evidence showing a miscarriage of justice, without the White House or the State Department doing anything.

In the United States, 90 prisoners have been executed since January 2010 to date, while another 3,222 inmates are awaiting execution on death row. Their government regularly brutally represses those who dare to denounce the injustice of the system.

This new attack against our country has a clear political intention, which has nothing to do with a legitimate concern for the lives of Cubans. It lashes out, with the complicity of financial and media empires such as Grupo Prisa and which administers CNN in Spanish, in the style of the Miami mafia. It irrationally accuses the Cuban government, which it blames, without even minimally investigating the reality of the facts. It condemns first and judges later, if at all.

It is obvious in this case that neither the authorities which have told of this fact with immediacy and clumsiness, nor the apparatus that serves the media aggression against Cuba, even took the time to confirm the information. Never mind the truth if the aim is to artificially produce and sell a false image of alleged gross and systematic violations of civil liberties in Cuba, which could someday justify intervention in order to "protect defenseless Cuban civilians."

Clearly the intention is to create an array of diabolical opinion, designed to show a significant deterioration in the human rights situation in Cuba, to build a so-called " victimized opposition dying in prisons," where they are even denied access to health services.

The whole world knows the humanist vocation of our doctors and health personnel, who spare no effort nor the scarce resources available to the country, largely because of the criminal blockade suffered by our people for over 50 years, to save lives and improve the health of its people and many others in all corners of the Earth.

Cuba has the respect and admiration of many peoples and governments who recognize their social work in the island and in the world.

Facts speak louder than words. The anti-Cuban campaigns will not dent the Cuban Revolution or its people, who continue to refine their socialism.

The truth about Cuba is that of a country where people are the most valuable: life expectancy at birth of 77.9 years on average, free health coverage for all its people, an infant mortality rate of 4.9 per thousand live births, better than the U.S., slightly inferior to Canada and is the lowest on the continent; an entire literate population and with full access to all levels of education free of charge, a 96% participation in the 2008 general elections, a democratic process of discussions of the economic and social guidelines, prior to the Sixth Party Congress.

The truth about Cuba is the country has taken its universities and schools to the prisons, where the inmates who were promptly and impartially judged, receive equal pay for their work and have high levels of medical care without regard to race, sex, creed or social origin.

Again it is shown that the lie, however many times it is repeated, does not necessarily become a truth, for "a just principle from the depths of a cave, can do more than an army."

(Cubaminrex)