Statements by the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, on January 13, about the possibility of Moscow deploying troops in Cuba did not go unnoticed on the island or among the Cuban exile community, which has become its strongest voice.
For this reason, this January 29, the French Association for Democracy in Cuba (AFDC, for its acronym in French) will march at 2:00 p.m. (French time) to the Russian embassy in Paris to repudiate what he considers a violation of Cuban sovereignty.
Ryabkov declared in Geneva that Russia could deploy troops and weapons in Cuba and Venezuela, if tensions continue between Moscow and Washington in the context of the crisis over Ukraine, which sparked the indignation outside and inside the island.
marches around the world
The march in France aims to generate a wave of reactions around the world around the same date to repudiate Russian interference, explained to Clarion the journalist Jorge Masetti, a member of the AFDC, raised in Cuba and married to Ileana de la Guardia, daughter of the executed Cuban soldier, Antonio de la Guardia.
The march in Paris counts with the support of the Council for the Transition to Democracy in Cuba.
“The Cuban internal opposition was the first to react. We join this protest against the attack on national sovereignty,” says Masetti, who trusts in a mobilization in several cities around the world.
Despite the failure in November of new demonstrations against the regime in Cuba like those that had been held in July, Masetti believes that eventually there will be new opposition marches on the island. And they will be spontaneous.
And if Russia materializes its plan to deploy troops in Cuba, the demonstration will no longer be citizen’s. “There will be a global mobilization but at the level of governments,” esteem.
In its statement dated January 16, the AFDC –made up of Cubans and French who fight for the defense of Human Rights in Cuba and the establishment of a democratic society– demands that the Russian governmentor “the withdrawal of the interventionist statements reminiscent of the infamous 1962 Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
They also claim the government of Cuba who “firmly opposes to this humiliation.
This communication was also sent to all the chancelleries of Europe in search of EU support.
“The Cuban people, who have lived under the Castro dictatorship for 63 years and lack the most basic human rights, must now endure this new humiliation without even seeing their country represented by those who govern it by force and repress it,” says the text.
And he adds: “The Cuban opposition in the interior of the island, in the midst of an extensive wave of repression, of the imprisonment of many of its leaders, and summary trials without legal guarantees for the citizens who demonstrated peacefully on July 11, has expressed its dismay and has vigorously protested against Russian interference, and the servile complicity of the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel through the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba”.
through the platform change.org, the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba is gathering signatures to repudiate Russian interference. The petition can be signed at https://chng.it/nyxWq4zX.