The following address was delivered by Cuban foreign minister Roberto Robaina to the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna on June 16.
All eyes are on the historic city of Vienna today. The hopes of hundreds of millions of men, women and children are placed on the World Conference on Human Rights. For that reason we have the moral and political obligation to achieve a real commitment that will recognise the rights of human beings everywhere. This is the challenge we are called upon to face with a real will of cooperation under the United Nations Charter.
Cuba has come here with this goal in mind. Our efforts made prior to the conference and in the future will continue to be linked to the aspirations of the peoples.
A failure at Vienna would mean perpetuating, or at best ignoring, the tragedy facing humankind. It would mean being apathetic toward those men and women who each day suffer the violation of their most basic rights, including the right to exist as human beings, or are victims of torture, political assassinations, forced disappearances or arbitrary detentions.
The credibility of the United Nations and its responsibility toward the human race are at stake. History will judge the action we take here, and we are obliged to go to the very heart of the matter and cut out all that which in our present system appears to be the source and sustenance of human rights violations.
We, the people of the South, have gathered a wealth of experience in the fight for our human rights, which have been denied us for centuries by an unjust international order. Nobody knows better than we the true significance of the universal values that have inspired this conference. No-one can give us lessons on this matter.
Today we are urged to embrace a so-called new world order founded on disrespect for our rights, disregard for our just aspirations and the imposition of
patterns and models quite divorced from our own history. In this way, the human rights issue is manipulated to justify the injustices we have been suffering for so long.
In the name of human rights, the mandates of the United Nations agencies are distorted. Efforts are being made to give the Security Council the role of world policeman, based on the designs and interests of a superpower and its allies who aim to establish new procedures and mechanisms with this end in mind.
They try to give a minority of countries the privilege of examining these rights. They try to question the principles of the United Nations Charter and international law.
Are preventive diplomacy, limited sovereignty and humanitarian intervention really the way to solve the pressing problems of this world? In the name of these options, people's blood is being spilled today in various parts of the earth.
This cannot be the way to free humanity from such poverty, hunger, malnutrition and illiteracy. This cannot be the way to free the world from the conditions which condemn more than two-thirds of its people to a miserable existence not so far removed from barbarism and which condemn millions of children to death before they are even born.
These are problems which persist and grow despite the endless number of statements, resolutions and conventions on the subject of human rights. Perhaps this is convenient for some, because if the dispossessed had been able to read and understand them they would have rebelled with greater force against such injustice.
To guarantee nations and the individuals within them the right to development is imperative for the solution of these calamities.
All around us, xenophobia, neo-fascism and racism are on the increase, and more and more women and children are suffering insidious forms of degradation. Unemployment is rising, the environment is deteriorating and dehumanised civilisation, in brutal
disorder, tramples over the underprivileged millions and discriminated people of this world. Whole nationalities find their culture crushed, as do ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, and indigenous populations, who continue to suffer the same fate even in this, their international year.
The burden of the foreign debt and economic adjustment programs imposed by international financial institutions double the misery and degradation of those who suffer most.
In the light of these circumstances, it has to be said that human rights are being violated more and more openly and the number of people without rights goes up each day.
The millions of people in industrialised countries who are marginalised within that system, and who today constitute what is known as the fourth world, do not escape from this tragedy.
Let's say no to empty words, to the distortion of history, to manipulation, to the imposition of force and attempts to deprive us of the right to decide our own destiny. Our duty is to change the rules of the game. Let it be the needs of the earth's population which motivate our actions, not the political interests of the opulent societies of the North.
How do we bridge the enormous gap between the rich North and the impoverished South if, added to this, we have the large-scale manipulation and politicisation of human rights, which divide them still further?
For some this conference is just a propaganda exercise and a means of satisfying the interests of self-proclaimed arbiters and champions of human rights.
They ignore the protests of the countries of the South and they manipulate the participation and real contribution of the non-governmental organisations at this conference. At the same time, the non-governmental organisations' presence is denied in other forums inside and outside the United Nations system.
If we're going to talk about real participation, let's begin by opening all the doors — from the Security Council down to the GATT — for a broader, franker and more democratic representation of all the non-
governmental organisations.
The time has come to say that, given the historic juncture at which humankind finds itself on the threshold of the 21st century, the universality of human rights can only be understood in terms of its indivisibility and interdependence.
We cannot accept, therefore, the return to a partial, inadequate concept of human rights and democracy, seen from within the narrow confines of one particular political schema.
International cooperation, based on the principles of objectivity, impartiality, lack of selectivity and no conditions, is the only way we have of removing the obstacles to the full exercising and enjoyment of everyone's rights and freedoms.
It would be unjust of me at this World Conference on Human Rights not to call, on behalf of my own people, for the lifting of the economic, trade and financial blockade that has been imposed on us for more than 30 years. This, without a shadow of a doubt, constitutes the most flagrant, full-scale and systematic violation of the entire Cuban people's right to life and survival.
The blockade aims to quash the Cubans' inalienable right to determine their own political, economic and social system and is attempting to starve our nation into submission and snatch away our independence and sovereignty. A whole people is being punished today, and that includes more than 2 million children, condemned to suffer the hardships of this criminal action, simply for having been born in Cuba.
Cubans today share the same conviction that our national hero José Martí expressed last century, faced with a similar threat; and I quote:
"Cuba demands the independence to which it has a right because of the genuine life it knows it possesses, because of the vigorous perseverance of its
sons and daughters, because of the wealth of its land, because of its natural independence, but more than this — and this is a reason above all reasons — because that is the firm and unanimous will of the Cuban people."
[Abridged from Granma International.]