The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, congratulated the newly elected President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum
Photo: Taken from President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s X account.
The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, congratulated the newly elected president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, with wishes for success in her administration and the willingness to continue strengthening the intimate brotherhood that unites our peoples.
In his account in the social network X, Díaz-Canel expressed that, through a phone call, he conveyed his admiration and sympathy for the victory.
In the same social network, Sheinbaum responded to Díaz-Canel, and affirmed that Mexico and Cuba are sister nations, united by ties of cooperation, solidarity and shared history.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela also highlighted the extraordinary demonstration of civic-mindedness and democracy that took place in Mexico on Sunday.
The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, highlighted that “Mexico elected a progressive as the first female president in its history. It is a triumph for the Mexican people and for its democracy, congratulations to my friend Claudia Sheinbaum, together we will work to see Latin America united and progressing”.
Like him, other presidents sent messages of congratulations for the victory, through their X accounts.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela highlighted the extraordinary demonstration of civility and democracy that was experienced in Mexico this Sunday. “I congratulate this noble people, its President Elect Claudia Sheinbaum, the Morena Party, the PT and the Social Movements,” he wrote.
On the other hand, also Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Riabkov congratulated Sheinbaum on her “impressive success” in Mexico’s presidential election. “We express hope that with the new Mexican leader our relations will further develop and gain new momentum,” he wrote on social networks.
The representative of the coalition of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), Labor and the Green Ecologist grouping parties, became the first woman to win the Presidency of Mexico, by obtaining between 58.3% and 60.7% of the votes in the general elections.
Sheinbaum became the first woman to win Mexico’s presidency by winning between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote in the election held the day before.
Cuba at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum-SPIEF 2024
Deputy Prime Minister Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz heads the delegation of the largest of the Antilles
Photo: Prensa Latina
The arrival in the Russian Federation of Cuban Deputy Prime Minister Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz responds to an official invitation for Cuba’s participation in the St. Petersburg 2024 International Economic Forum.
The event, convened under the theme The basis of a multipolar world: formation of new points of growth, will be attended by more than 17,000 people from 136 countries.
The agenda of the Cuban delegation, according to a press release, will promote the expansion and diversification of economic, commercial, financial and cooperation relations between Cuba and Russia, considered by the leaders of both countries as allied relations.
In this regard, contacts will be held with official and business counterparts related to the main issues of the bilateral agenda and the agreements adopted to achieve the effective participation of the Russian Federation in Cuba’s National Economic and Social Development Plan until 2030.
There will also be a meeting of co-chairs of the Intergovernmental Commission for Economic-Commercial and Scientific-Technical Relations, where, together with the Vice President of the Russian Government, Dmitry Chernyshenko, the Cuban Deputy Prime Minister will review the fundamental issues dealt with by this bilateral mechanism.
The Cuban delegation is also made up of the Minister of Transport, Eduardo Rodríguez Dávila; Ambassador Julio Garmendía Peña; the First Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment (Mincex), Carlos Luis Jorge Méndez; the director of Europe of the Foreign Ministry, Ileana Núñez Mordoche, and the director of Commercial Policy with this region of the Mincex, Inalvis Bonachea González.
The Cuban government will study the most recent U.S. measures and, if they do not violate national legislation and mean an opening that benefits the Cuban population, even if only a segment, it will not hinder their implementation
Photo: Cubaminrex
On May 28, the U.S. Government finally announced a set of measures to put into effect its May 16, 2022 announcements. The objective of this step, according to the text published by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), is to favor the private sector in Cuba.
The measures are limited and do not touch the fundamental body of the blockade against Cuba nor the additional sanctions that make up the policy of maximum pressure. Once again, the US government’s decision is based on its own distorted vision of the Cuban reality, by artificially separating the private sector from the public sector, when both are part of the Cuban business system and of society as a whole.
With this announcement, the U.S. Government intends to target only one segment of our population. It does not eliminate or modify the coercive measures that today most affect the Cuban economy and public services and that severely damage the well-being of our entire population.
If the announced measures are implemented, the United States seeks to put the private sector, which has been legally established and has grown under the measures taken in a sovereign act by the Cuban Government in consultation with the Cuban people, at an advantage. The same has happened with Internet access established and expanded by Cuba despite the obstacles of the blockade and restrictions to prevent free access to hundreds of tools and websites.
The U.S. government has been explicit in its intention to use this sector for political purposes against the Revolution, depending on its regime change objectives.
Even if this is a capricious selectivity, both the public and private sectors will continue to suffer the consequences of the blockade and the absurd inclusion of Cuba in the list of States that allegedly sponsor terrorism.
The coercive measures that make up the economic blockade will remain in force with cruel effect on the entire Cuban population. It is evident that the U.S. ratifies its will to punish Cuba’s state sector, knowing that it provides essential services such as education, health, culture, sports and others to all Cubans, including the private sector; and that it is the guarantee of social justice and equity among citizens. For this reason, recent measures were taken by the U.S. Government to persecute Cuba’s international medical cooperation and documents have been published that reveal that it is continuing its efforts to deprive us of income and destabilize the country for political purposes of domination.
The Cuban Government will study these measures and, if they do not violate national legislation and mean an opening that benefits the Cuban population, even if only a segment, it will not hinder their implementation.
Havana, May 28, 2024
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.
