Our people have reacted with deep outrage to the public denunciation of the shameless and repeated acts of provocation by the Chief of the United States Interests Section in Cuba, acts that have clearly been conceived and carried out as part of the current U.S. administration’s hostile and aggressive policy towards Cuba, with the close cooperation and support of the Miami terrorist mob and the extreme right wing in the United States.
The people’s outrage has grown even greater in the face of the cowardly and cruel measures of revenge adopted against the five Cubans who have been arbitrarily and spuriously sentenced to unjust, lengthy and in some cases lifelong prison terms, far from their homeland and their families.
The Cuban government strictly complies with the norms and principles that govern diplomatic relations between states. It has tried and will continue to try to act with extreme calm as it provides and will always provide, as it does with all others, full guarantees for the security of the U.S. diplomatic personnel who work in our country. Nevertheless, Cuba finds itself obliged to limit the movements of U.S. diplomatic personnel within Cuban territory, in reciprocity with the measures recently adopted by the United States against our own diplomatic personnel in Washington.
No country, no matter how powerful it may be, has any right to turn its diplomatic representation into the organizer, financier, director and headquarters of activities aimed at destabilizing and subverting the constitutional order, infringing the law, conspiring against social development, boycotting economic relations, threatening the security and destroying the independence of another country.
Using diplomatic facilities, immunities and exemptions to openly carry out such activities is a highly unusual and cynical undertaking. Thus, the norms provided by international law will be applied against this practice.
Obviously, the goal of the enemies of our Revolution is to strike out against and damage the relations and ties of friendship that have patiently and progressively been forged between the peoples of Cuba and the United States, as the truth has gradually come to light, despite the deluge of lies and slander that have rained down on public opinion in the United States and the world regarding our country and its unsurpassable record of justice and humanism, in the midst of an unjust and ruthless blockade. We greatly value these relations with the people of the United States and we will continue to strive for them, regardless the difficulties that may arise.
Faced with the professed and shameless intent to organize from within a mercenary force like the one that invaded us through the Bay of Pigs, following orders from a foreign government, or that organized armed gangs, or killed teachers and literacy workers, assailed boats, kidnapped fishermen, carried out thousands of acts of sabotage and sowed terror and mourning throughout our country, disguised this time as seemingly harmless sheep to support the criminal policy of the government of that same country against our homeland, to slander us and justify the blockade, the economic strangulation and the isolation of our people, there can be absolutely no doubt that the Revolution will apply, with the necessary energy and to the extent that the circumstances demand it, the laws passed to defend it from new and old tactics and strategies against Cuba.
For these reasons, several dozen people directly linked with the conspiratorial activities carried out by Mr. James Cason have been arrested by the corresponding authorities and will stand trial in the courts of justice.
The Revolution has often been generous and tolerant by virtue of its immense political strength and its capacity to withstand all kinds of aggression in all areas. It has demonstrated this throughout 44 years. It demonstrated it from a human perspective with the Bay of Pigs mercenaries, who spent barely a few months in prison; with the hundreds of counterrevolutionaries involved in assassination plots against the leaders of the Revolution; and with the thousands who have perpetrated acts of sabotage and other crimes, all of them at the service of the U.S. government, and have been released before fully serving their prison sentences, and even allowed to travel to and reside in the United States. Adequately severe laws against serious acts carried out in complicity with the enemy that seeks to destroy us have not been applied, although they are fully in force.
This should not lead anyone to believe that acts of treason at the service of a foreign power, which threaten the security and interests of our heroic country will meet with guaranteed impunity. Generosity and tolerance cannot be expected of the Revolution when we are witnesses to such brutal and abhorrent acts as the cruel and inhuman treatment being endured by our five heroic compatriots, who risked their lives to defend their people and even the people of the United States from terrorism and death, while mercenaries with neither scruples nor conscience, the vast majority of them full-time loafers that live off of selling shreds of the homeland for the gold of the empire, expecting impunity.
Those who are familiar with the Cuban Revolution know very well that it is not given to bluffing, and that there is no power in the world that can intimidate it.
March 18, 2003
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