Cuban President Diaz-Canel Admits That His Government has ‘Lagged Behind’ in the Recognition of Some Rights

President Miguel Díaz-Canel, during the closing of the Third Plenary Session of the Communist Party of Cuba, this Friday in Havana. (Screen capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 18 December 2021 — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged that his government has been late in defending certain social rights. Speaking this Friday, at the closing of the Third Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, for the umpteenth time,he again defended socialism as “the only way to development with social justice” and denounced the attempts of “the articulators of the campaigns against Cuba “for” breaking the sacred national unity.

“Racial, gender, animal protection and environmental issues are constantly superimposed on digital platforms with stark attacks on institutions (…) without recognizing the efforts and progress made by the State and civil society organizations to eliminate the burdens that hinder the performance of those rights and guarantees,” lamented Díaz-Canel. “In some areas it is true that we have lagged behind or reached a point — that is where we have to take a leap — and in others we have made much progress, but perhaps not communicated enough, debated enough, agreed enough.”

To do this, the solution he proposes is to change the “old ways of communicating,” because, he continued, “the times impose it and because, as the unforgettable Aute would say: ’Our lives are going on in it’.”

Díaz-Canel did not miss the opportunity to refer, with metaphors and disqualifications, to the frustrated Civic March for Change, convened by the Archipíelago platform for November 15, which the president calls “a destabilizing plan that has not yet ceased.”

“That plan was to reach its climax on November 15th. Some digital platforms even talked about the last day of the Cuban Revolution; however, it was the last day of a highly rehearsed play that never got its premiere,” said the hand-picked president, in clear allusion, without naming him, to the playwright Yunior García Aguilera, took off for Spain two days after suffering, on November 14, a prolonged act of repudiation that prevented him from leaving his home.

Diaz-Canel refers to García Aguilera as “the articulator of the interrupted theatrical act” whom “his employers try to use by putting cameras and microphones on him wherever he moves… In what some analysts call ’the Miamization of Madrid’, the hard right of the old metropolis is competing with the unpresentable anti-Cuban politicians based [sic] in Miami,” said the president, who concluded his speech with the Castro slogan “homeland or death, we will win. “

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