Press release
We will not stop defending the sovereignty of the Cuban people
January 17, 2022
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei RYABKOV said on January 13 in Geneva that his government could deploy troops and strategic weapons to Cuba and Venezuela if tensions between Moscow and Washington persist over the crisis in Ukraine.
These statements caused a wave of perplexity and surprise in the world and among Cubans, both on the island and abroad, without an official statement from Havana having been made public. The government of Miguel Diaz-Canel has maintained a complicit silence in the face of these provocations which call into question the independence and sovereignty of Cuba. The current government of Vladimir Putin believes it has the right, as in the Cold War era, to impose its hegemony over Cuba by using the island as a pawn in the international geopolitical chessboard, with the aim of not assuming its responsibility in the Ukrainian border crisis and to threaten the United States and its allies in the European Union.
The Cuban people, who have been living under the Castro dictatorship for 63 years and suffering from the violation of their most basic human rights, must now bear this new humiliation, not even being represented by those who rule them by force and repress them. The Cuban opposition inside the island, despite the huge wave of repression, the imprisonment of many of its leaders and the summary hearings without legal guarantees for the citizens who demonstrated peacefully on July 11, expressed through the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba his dismay and vigorously protested against the Russian interference and the servile complicity of the government of Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Our Association France for Democracy in Cuba, made up of Cubans and French people who fight for the defense of human rights in Cuba and for the advent of a democratic society, in solidarity with the Cubans who cannot express themselves freely, joins this protest and demands that the Russian government retract these statements of interference, which are reminiscent of the infamous Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. We also call on the Cuban government to firmly oppose these humiliating maneuvers.
The Association France for Democracy in Cuba, faced with the seriousness of this situation, asks the French government, the country that chairs the Council of the EU:
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that he take these provocations into account during the negotiations with Russia about the crisis on the Ukrainian border,
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that he raises with the Cuban government the incompatibility of these interventions with the Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement between the EU and Cuba, which is subject to greater respect for human rights and democratic openness that would be impossible with the Russian presence.
We will not stop mobilizing with the Cuban community all over the world and the Cubans on the island until the withdrawal of this ignominy from the government of Moscow. Therefore, we call for demonstrations in front of Russian representations on January 29, 2022 to defend Cuban sovereignty, which its government allows to be trampled on.