Dear compatriots:
May 1st, International Workers’ Day is coming in tribute to those who produce and sustain life.
More than 30 years ago, after the fall of socialism in Europe, the massive celebrations of this day were limited to a few countries, Cuba among them.
With legitimate pride, today we can say that in the midst of the hardest shortages we never ceased to raise the banners of socialism.
During the following years, delegations from all over the world arrived and still arrive to celebrate the day in this small and exceptional nation where the workers rule.
They want to witness and share in the strength of our difficult, yet joyful resistance.
They do not want to miss the impressive example of this people, capable of celebrating the rights won, even under the worst economic conditions and at the same time criticizing and demanding that even with a blockade we are capable of defeating our own inadequacies and mistakes.
That is what the working class was empowered to do since the triumph of 1959, and that power was strengthened when Cuba declared itself the first socialist state in the Western hemisphere.
These days are no better than those, when utopia was an invisible horizon under the weight of the defeat of socialism in other latitudes.
Just as then we paraded celebrating the sustained power of workers and peasants, creators and artists, today we are here ready to parade to continue celebrating.
The hurricane winds of imperial power have blown and are blowing today over our economy, with more force than ever and determined to erase from the universal political map this example of daring creative resistance.
Let us demonstrate once again that we are not alive and standing because the greatest enemy of the Cuban people wanted us to be. We are alive, standing, resisting and creating by the will of Cuban men and women.
And this time with a special inspiration. May 1st marks the 25th anniversary of Fidel’s historic speech in the Revolution Square full of people, when he called on us to act with “a sense of the historical moment”, to “change everything that must be changed”, and to “emancipate ourselves by ourselves and with our own efforts”.
As Fidel said at the time: “Revolution is unity, independence, fighting for our dreams of justice for Cuba and for the world”.
Let us parade on May 1st showing the strength of unity. For our independence and our dreams of justice.
Against the blockade and fascism. Against the genocide in Gaza and against the silent genocides provoked by the sea of injustice that threatens our species.
Let us parade for the better world that Cuba wants and deserves.
See you on May 1st. in the Revolution Square!
Cuba, from the Global South, denounced the coercive measures impacting development
The Cuban Foreign Minister pointed out that it is imperative to articulate a new international economic order and reformulate the current financial architecture
Photo: Cubaminrex
The impact of the suffocating economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States Government on Cuba, which the people have been enduring for over six decades, was the main denunciation made by the member of the Political Bureau of the Party and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, at the Third Summit of the Voice of the Global South.
During the virtual meeting hosted by India, the Cuban Foreign Minister stated that such coercive measures, intensified since 2019, constitute a “serious obstacle to the full achievement of the country’s economic and social development.”
He reiterated that the inclusion of the Antillean nation in the arbitrary and fraudulent list of alleged state sponsors of terrorism only reinforces the effects of such inhumane policy, and expressed gratitude for the international community’s support shown through the rejection of this system of measures.
Furthermore, he conveyed gratitude for the invitation to the forum, highlighting it as a space “to discuss and channel the efforts of developing nations in addressing the enormous challenges amidst a complex international context.”
He called on nations to multiply solidarity and cooperation in the face of coercion, unilateralism, and selfishness, recalling that these core values and principles defined Cuba’s presidency of the G-77 + China in 2023.
Rodríguez Parrilla emphasized that during that time, it was demonstrated that “when we act cohesively, developing countries are a relevant actor and a weighty interlocutor in defense of the interests of our peoples.”
An idea as noble as the Refugee Olympic Team cannot fall prey to manipulation
Today, the IOC, and the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, are mixing oil with vinegar. To put it more clearly, they are complicit in the aggressive and criminal policy of the United States against Cuba
Demographic trends, armed conflicts, natural disasters, structural inadequacies of development, inequalities in national economies, conditions of poverty in broad sectors, inequities of an unjust and predatory world order, lack of job opportunities and, in general, the growing gap between poverty and wealth, stimulate the mobility of human beings.
I take up again the quote of Dr. Antonio Díaz Aja, director of the Center for Demographic Studies of the University of Havana, which I used a few years ago in a similar context, because, as he stated, “migratory dysfunctionality is a product of the basic contradictions of the world we live in”. Sport is no exception, it has become a means to extirpate the South of its best children; that is why many of the sending geographies were former colonies of today’s receiving ones.
Until April 2019, in football, Brazil, with 1 330 players, was the most exporting country, with presence in 147 tournaments. Argentina had more than 800 players in the English and Italian leagues. In the MLB that season, there were 256 players who were not born in the United States (28%), and 228 of them were Latin American. In basketball, the NBA had 116 players of other nationalities.
A study by the University of Maryland showed that in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 Olympic Games, more than 300 migrants won medals, or were part of a team that won medals. In the Pyeongchang-2018 Winter Olympics, 178 athletes participated for countries where they were not born.
Cuba has already had Olympic champions under a flag that is not its own, such as Pedro Pablo Pichardo, in Tokyo-2020, in the triple jump; in Paris-2024, the now Portuguese will have as rival his fellow countryman Andy Diaz, now Spanish. In 2016, we saw Osmani Juantorena in the Italian volleyball sextet, and in July the same will happen with the “Pole” Wilfredo Leon. In the Pan American Games in Santiago de Chile, there were several duels between Cubans representing their homeland and those representing another.
But the “story” of the Cubans on the world sports map is longer. Athletes from the largest of the Antilles have been victims of the crime of human trafficking; there are countless examples of baseball players who have been, and still are, victims of this scourge. Discrediting campaigns and incitement to desertion of delegations have been organized, also through crime, in the venues of multisport events, such as Central American (Ponce-1993), Pan American (Indianapolis-1987 and Winnipeg-1999) and Olympic (Rio de Janeiro-2016), without the International Olympic Committee (IOC) showing any ethical stance.
Today, the IOC, and the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, are mixing oil with vinegar. To put it more clearly, they are making themselves accomplices of the aggressive and criminal policy of the United States against Cuba, which has used the theft of talent and organized irregular migration – with all its human cost on top, because life does not interest them -, with the aim of discrediting it, attacking one of its great conquests: its sports movement.
Since 2016, the IOC, in a beautiful and humane initiative, created the Olympic Refugee Team (EOR). The first retinue participated in the Games of that year, in Rio de Janeiro; the second, in Tokyo-2020, and Paris will host the third. It is a delegation made up basically of young people uprooted by war or persecuted for reasons of ethnicity, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinions.
For more than 75 years, the Palestinian people have been victims of this persecution, violence and death. What is happening in Gaza today is happening in full view of the world, and the displaced people in Rafah make up half of the population of that region. But in none of the three editions has a Palestinian been in the EOR.
In the three rosters, including the one that will participate in the French capital, there are 75 athletes; 58 of them, 77%, reside in countries of the developed world. Of those who will go to the City of Light, only three live in underdeveloped nations.
Then, the presence of two Cuban athletes in the EOR is not serious, because it is based on a lie: Fernando Dayán Jorge, Olympic champion in Tokyo-2020, in canoeing, and Ramiro Mora Romero, in weightlifting.
Can one be a refugee, according to the concept of the United Nations, and be an Olympic, World, Pan-American and Central American and Caribbean champion, at only 22 years of age? Can one achieve that being a persecuted or uprooted by war? The IOC and the UNHCR are wrong or lend themselves to the farce against Cuba, which defends the Olympic Refugee Team, because it should be an expression of peace through sport, one of the noblest ideas in the face of the injustice that these people live.
Cuba has not claimed the presence of its nationals with other delegations, when they comply with the provisions of the Olympic Charter. But not only that, it has helped, as it has just done with the Chilean wrestling team, the preparation of those who were born in its entrails and now compete for that geography, as the gladiator Yasmani Acosta. Cuba proudly receives the dedication of those who live abroad and wear the national jersey, as did the baseball Team Asere.
What it does not accept, and that is why it denounces it, is manipulation. We Cubans are not surprised that campaigns against our country are fed, but the fact that the International Olympic Committee and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees appear in these dirty maneuvers is outrageous.
It is not Cuba that uses sports as politics, it is the empire defeated for 65 years that resents that, after wanting to starve it to death, to leave it without fuel, to speculate with its finances against an entire people, a black man like Mijaín López, or one like Idalys Ortiz rises to the top of the podium, reserved for the rich world, for those who exploit.
The Olympic Charter states that: “As sport is an activity that is part of society, sports organizations within the Olympic Movement must apply the principle of political neutrality”. But this is the most violated precept.
