Mother of Fernando González, in front of the UN Human Rights Commission in GenevaMr. Chairman:
Ladies and gentlemen:
I am the mother of Fernando González Llort, one of the five Cubans currently imprisoned in United States jails and today I bring their message to this Commission.
“Five Cuban patriots, for the only crime of protecting our people from terrorism, are currently serving, in U.S. prisons, the sixth year of a vindictive and unjustifiable imprisonment. To our irrational sentences, derived from a dark legal process in which we were meticulously denied every right as defendants, has been added a barbarian conduct that has targeted our dearest relatives thus trying to break our spirit and taking ruthless retaliation, in our persons, against everything we stand for.
“The denial of our human rights as individuals is used in this case as the consecration of a more massive and criminal violation of rights: that which is committed against a people that, for not kneeling down, is denied the most elemental right to determine their own destiny and the way to organize their institutions and life.
“Our case is only the consecration of the right of the most powerful to exercise violence, promote terrorism, decide who can defend themselves and who cannot, and to conspire with unpatriotic persons and mercenaries to bring death to the country where they were born. The prosecutors’ contempt for their own laws, their systematic disrespect towards judges, their abuse of power, their threats to witnesses and their excellence of hypocrisy and cynicism reflect the way in which they want to, shamelessly, force upon humanity the right of the strongest as the only and supreme human right.
“With the same impunity that they impose, on sheer force, resolutions against Cuba in this Commission, they imposed in our case a legal verdict that amply honors the hypocritical concept of the U.S. Government regarding human rights or the fight against terror.
“Today on us and our families is discharged all the obsessive hatred that has been discharged on the Cuban people over the last 45 years. For every passing hour without seeing our children, there are thousands of Cubans that have been killed, victims of terrorism, without having seen their loved ones grow up.
“For every caress that our children lack, there are thousand of Cuban children that were condemned not to receive a caress form their parents. Our wives and mothers can be considered lucky as compared with the thousand of widows and mothers who have lost their husbands or children, victims of terrorism financed, organized and executed against Cuba from the United States.
“For trying to prevent this suffering, we are being punished and so are our mothers, our wives and our children. This is the version of human rights that is opening the 21st Century when we were supposed to have learned something from a great many empires that sank in their own barbarity, arrogance and hypocrisy.
“If the empire we now suffer from fails to take down with it the entire human species and civilization is able to survive today's imbalance between excess technology and lack of wisdom, those looking back at us from the future will feel little sympathyfuture will feel little sympathyhat Cuba has been subjected to, of which our case is only a chapter.
“Those who are to write that history should not spare their respects either to the heroic and supportive people that has always been able to resist all forms of aggression, whose only shield has been the strength of its morale, the inheritance of its history and the humanist legacy filled with love and firmness, passed down from their best sons and daughters. We are recipients of this all, and we are not going to give up a bit of our principles, irrespective of what the empire does or fails to do in connection with our rights.”
Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero and René González
Thank you very much.