“Cuba’s designation on the U.S.’s Terrorist list designation is a means of enforcing the U.S. blockade against Cuba.”
Given the typical spin U.S. corporate media puts on stories about Cuba one would assume the March 31st meeting between the United States and Cuba on human rights would be awkward for Cuba. The U.S. propaganda has continuously characterized Cuba as abusing the human rights of its citizens and imprisoning people merely for political dissent. But, on the contrary, it is the very topic of human rights that enables the tables to turn and affords an opportunity to expose the reality within both countries.
No major announcements emerged from the meeting, the first formal dialogue between the countries on human rights since U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced on December 17, 2014 that they were seeking to restore diplomatic ties.
However, the head of the Cuban delegation to the talks, Pedro Luis Pedroso said, “We expressed our concerns regarding discrimination and racism patterns in U.S. society, the worsening of police brutality, torture acts and extrajudicial executions in the fight on terror and the legal limbo of prisoners at the US prison camp in Guantanamo.” “During a news conference in Washington, the deputy general director for Multilateral Affairs and International Law at the Cuban Foreign Ministry said that the island´s delegation also put forth its concern about the limitation of labor rights and union liberties.”
As such, some of us working in the Cuba solidarity movement feel this is also a window of opportunity to connect and raise the issues of U.S. mass incarceration, the epidemic of police killings, and the plight of political prisoners like American Indian Movement freedom fighter Leonard Peltier and revolutionary Black journalist Mumia Abu Jamal. Currently Mumia is in a fight for his life from a callous extralegal execution through state sponsored medical malpractice.