14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 23 September2020 — Beyond a hit horror movie from the 80s, The Monster Club has become a category to identify groups of humans in different spheres. In the convulsed and polarized world in which we live, each extreme feels entitled to place countries and governments in their particular vision of monstrosity, based on political, economic, religious or ideological criteria.
The recent virtual presentation at the United Nations by the President of the Republic of Cuba, Mr. Miguel Díaz-Canel, confirmed the country’s membership of one of these groups.
Díaz-Canel ratified his solidarity with the civic-military union that controls Venezuela today and condemned the attempts to “destroy the work started by Commander Hugo Chávez Frías and continued by President Nicolás Maduro Moros.” He corroborated “the invariable solidarity with the Nicaraguan people and with the Government led by Commander Daniel Ortega”; he “strongly condemned the unilateral and unjust sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” and expressed “solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran in the face of the aggressive escalation by the United States.”
As if that were not enough, making veiled allusion to the incidents in Hong Kong, he condemned “the interference in the internal affairs of the People’s Republic of China, and expressed his opposition to “any attempt to damage its territorial integrity and sovereignty,” and rejected “foreign interference in the internal affairs of the Republic of Belarus,” reiterating his “solidarity with the legitimate president of that country, Alexander Lukashenko.”
He presented other less monstrous demands, such as the demand for reparations from some Caribbean nations for the horrors of slavery; the “historic commitment to self-determination and independence of the brotherly people of Puerto Rico”; “the legitimate claim to Argentine sovereignty over the Malvinas, South Sandwich and South Georgia islands”; and “the commitment to peace in Colombia.”
All these demands, formally enunciated on behalf of Cuba in this forum, actually reflect the ideological predilections of the political party that holds power on the island. It cannot even be said that they are seeking to position the nation in an advantageous way from the perspective of those who would like to invest or those who could collaborate. These are statements that emphasize the continuity with the past that placed Cuba at the failed pole of the Cold War.
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