Cuban diplomacy at work

HAVANA, Cuba, Jan 20 (ACN) Dr. Felisberto Vieira, deputy to the National Assembly for the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde, formally nominated today the Henry Reeve International Contingent—doctors specialized in disaster situations and serious epidemics—for the Nobel Peace Prize.

This nomination adds to the dozens of petitions received from all over the world to grant the award to our doctors, the Cuban Foreign Ministry states today in its Cubaminrex website.

A note from the Cuban Embassy in Belarus remarks that the Belarusian Association of Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries and the Belarusian-Cuba Friendship Association issued a Declaration of Condemnation for the inclusion of the Island in the US State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The Declaration highlights that for years the United States has used various international platforms and formats to exert strategic pressure on the island, seeking to deliver a "blow to the Cuban political system and development model" and has ignored the continuous calls from the international community to change that policy and lift the criminal blockade.

It also explains that the recent labeling of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. government and its inclusion in the Department of State’s list of such countries are another example of the violation of international law and the basic norms of international relations.

The Declaration finishes by expressing the signatories’ support of the Republic of Cuba and its people in their legitimate demand for an end to the aggressive U.S. Cuba policy and to the unjust and longest system of unilateral sanctions ever imposed on any country, and by urging the Cuban nation to resist, prosper and promptly enthrone justice.

On her end, Cuban Ambassador to Cambodia Liurka Rodríguez, interviewed by Fresh News, also condemned the fraudulent qualification of Cuba as a State sponsor of terrorism and said that the U.S. government's decision is a cynical and hypocritical act solely intended to defame Cuba and undermine any possibility of recomposing bilateral relations, thus settling an opportunistic debt to extremist sectors opposed to our country.

Likewise, Rodríguez emphasized that Cuba does not confer any authority to the qualification lists of nations issued by the State Department, since they are unilateral and have no mandate or international legitimacy.

She also pointed out that the arguments used by the State Department are fallacious and the truism that Cuba is not a State sponsor of terrorism, and that its attitude toward such a scourge has been impeccable, Cubaminrex reports.