Havana, Cuba, Apr 21, 2009 / 15:14 pm
The president of the Christian Liberation Movement, Oswaldo Paya, called on the governments of the Americas not to be accomplices with the Cuban regime by being silent on human rights abuses. Instead, he said, they should begin an open dialogue that includes the Cuba people.
“No honest man should talk about Cuba or for Cuba before demanding respect for Cubans’ rights and the release of those cruelly imprisoned in our country for peacefully defending human rights,” Paya said in a message for the recent Summit of the Americas.
In his message, the Cuban dissident leader called on the government of the United States to lift the economic embargo, since Cubans “have never asked for, nor do we want, the isolation and exclusion of our country.”
Paya also mentioned those who wish to use the embargo to justify the lack of rights in Cuba.
“Those who justify the lack of rights in Cuba with the existence of such an embargo, or who silence the lack of civil, political and economic rights, do not have the best interests of our people at heart, nor do they respect our interests,” he stated.
With regard to the violation of human rights, Paya criticized the majority of the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean of forgetting the Cuban people by maintaining relations with the Communist government “based on complacency and silence about the gross violation of civil and political rights in Cuba .
“These governments use, for their political interests, a false image of the Cuban reality that has been distorted and replaced by a mask imposed by the culture of fear in our society,” Paya stated.
Paya also denounced “artists, intellectuals and politicians, who with both good and sinister intentions, use our country as a stage to rave about hatred and the utopia of totalitarianism, while presenting themselves as defenders of the poor.”
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“The Summit of the Americas should be the start of this new dialogue that would be a new hope for the New World,” Paya said.