Parliamentarians from Europe, the United States and Canada together with activists from Cuban civil society and the opposition established on Saturday the Transatlantic Forum for a Free Cuba, an initiative to coordinate transcontinental actions to support the demand for democratic changes on the island.
“The Transatlantic Forum for a Free Cuba was born to coordinate actions on both sides of the Atlantic to support the Cuban people’s demand for democratic changes,” the fledgling organization created through the “Resolution Cuba” initiative said in the founding statement.
“We Cubans are not alone. This is the first message that the Transatlantic Forum wants to convey,” he said. Rosa Maria Baia, the leader of Cuba was decided and also a member of the Foundation for American Democracy (FDP).
Baia stressed that this forum “is an advocacy strategy for governments and institutions in Europe and the Americas to act in defense of the Cuban people’s right to democracy,” and warned that “we are in the presence of a regime that has affected this. Dramatically for several generations of Cubans, the regime responsible for the collapse in Venezuela and the Americas, a system that represents the Berlin Wall in one hemisphere.”
The meeting included a telephone intervention by the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, who emphasized that it was time to “reaffirm the basic values of the hemisphere”, and to restore the concepts of “freedom” and “human rights”.
He stressed that “the failure of the Cuban revolution has a heavy cost to the Americas and our peoples.”
Almagro also considered it shameful that the islanders had to “confront the worst kind of dictatorship,” and emphasized that “our commitment to the Cuban people must always be.”
vice president European ParliamentDita Charanzova participated in the forum and pledged to support the struggle of the Cuban people and to take actions aimed at empowering civil society on the island.
Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, of Washington, noted that she will continue to “demand this administration understand that this is the moment to be able to right the historic wrong of the Bay of Pigs and support the Cuban people.”
He stressed that “this administration has been slowing down for four months and has done nothing.”
Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart expressed confidence that the “inevitability” is approaching, the “freedom of Cuba.” While Senator Rick Scott reminded Cubans on and off the island: “They are not alone, we are in this together.”
from Washington Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio He said he would not rest “until he realizes the dream of a free Cuba,” and reiterated his support for the Cubans who are demonstrating.
For his part, Representative Hermann Tirsch shared his experience as a journalist in the fall of the communist countries in Eastern Europe. “Now it is no different. There is no time left for the Cuban dictatorship. It is necessary to put an end to what kept that dictatorship, it lives and survives thanks to the complicity of the European and American democracies,” he said. .
Cuban visual artist Tania Bruguera, who has endorsed via approximation, also intervened that in recent months “we have lived through a process in which the government has focused on instilling fear in the people, but despite the repression, the people’s claims are clear claims . . of freedom.”
The establishment of the Forum was a denunciation of the situation of Cuban political prisoners, in particular the leader of the Cuban National Union Jose Daniel Ferrer, who has been in precarious conditions in the Santiago de Cuba prison since July 11.
The Forum aims to be a tool for coordinating condemnations of the regime’s arbitrariness in the face of attacks on the Cuban people. It came to prominence after the July 11 protests on the island, when hundreds of people in the Caribbean nation were arrested with impunity.
