Diaz-Canel's Speech at Summit for New Global Financial Pact

 Speech by Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermudez, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, at the Summit on the New International Financial Pact, in France, on June 22, 2023, "Year 65 of the Revolution".
Your Excellency Mr. Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic;

Your Excellencies Presidents Gustavo Petro and Cyril Ramaphosa:

First and foremost, I am grateful for the invitation to participate in this Summit for a New Global Financial Pact, which could be another starting point towards a broader intergovernmental process of discussion and decision-making within the framework of the United Nations.

We are attending this meeting with the enormous responsibility that it means for Cuba to chair the Group of 77 plus China, the most representative grouping of developing nations and the one that has historically been the flag and spokesperson for the demands that bring us together today.
I am not revealing any secret if I state that the most harmful consequences of the current international economic and financial order, deeply unjust, antidemocratic, speculative and exclusionary, weigh most heavily on developing nations.

It is our countries that have seen their foreign debt practically double in the last ten years; those that have had to spend 379 billion dollars of their reserves to defend their currencies in 2022, almost double the amount of new Special Drawing Rights assigned to them by the International Monetary Fund.

Under such unfavorable conditions, the South cannot generate and access the 4.3 billion dollars a year needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in the remaining decade of action.

Our people cannot and should not continue to be laboratories of colonial recipes and renewed forms of domination that use debt, the current international financial architecture and unilateral coercive measures to perpetuate underdevelopment and increase the coffers of a few at the expense of the South. A new and fairer international order is urgently needed as the greatest of all urgencies.

To this end, it will be essential to address, as has been discussed here today, a reform of the international financial institutions, both in terms of governance and representation and of access to financing that takes due account of the legitimate interests of developing countries and expands their decision-making capacity in the financial institutions.

In the 21st century, it is unacceptable that the majority of nations on the planet continue imposing on us obsolete institutions inherited from the Cold War and Bretton Woods, far removed from the current international configuration and conceived to profit from the reserves of the South, perpetuate the imbalance and apply short-term recipes to reproduce a scheme of modern colonialism.

An early and substantial recapitalization of the multilateral development banks is needed to improve their lending conditions and meet the financial needs of the South. This includes calling on countries with unused Special Drawing Rights to redirect them to these banks and developing countries, taking into account their needs, special circumstances and vulnerabilities.

Official loans for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals must be increased. Our countries need additional resources to be backed by concrete actions in market access, capacity building and technology transfer.

There is also an urgent need to establish measures of progress in sustainable development that go beyond gross domestic product to define developing countries' access to concessional financing and appropriate technical cooperation.

We must also bear in mind that climate change has transformed the nature of development challenges, and therefore the internationally agreed climate agenda must be implemented in accordance with the principle of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

It is deeply disappointing that the target of mobilizing $100 billion per year up to 2020 as climate finance has never been met. Add to that the accumulation of defaults and the impact of inflation, and this target that was never really based on the needs and priorities of developing countries or on science is considerably higher.

Excellencies:

The time has come to send a clear political message that renews our collective commitment to implement the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals.

The current bases that define North-South relations and coexistence on the planet must be rethought.

I conclude with a question and a warning that Fidel left us almost ten years ago: "If today it is possible to extend the life, health and useful time of people, if it is perfectly possible to plan the development of the population by virtue of increasing productivity, culture and the development of human values. What are you waiting for to do so?

"Righteous ideas will triumph or disaster will triumph."

Let us not go down in history as the leaders who could have made a difference in the common destiny and were unable to achieve it.

Let us not ignore the warnings, let us not underestimate the urgencies. Let us act with a sense of endangered species. Let us act with a sense of humanity.
Thank you very much.