On August 11, artists, intellectuals, political leaders, people’s movements, trade unions, and political parties from around the world launched a historic campaign to call on US President Joe Biden to remove Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list.
The convening organizations of this campaign, the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), ALBA Movimientos, Foro de São Paulo, Trade Union Confederation of the Americas, Jornada Continental por la Democracia y Contra el Neoliberalismo, World March of Women, Continental Latin American and Caribbean Network in Solidarity with Cuba, and La Vía Campesina, seek to collect more than one million signatures on a letter addressed to Biden asking that Cuba be removed from the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism. The letter will be delivered to Biden on the occasion of Human Rights Day, which is celebrated on December 10.
The letter states that Cuba’s inclusion on the list, “makes it much harder for Cuba to make transactions using international banking systems and acquire necessary goods on the international market, such as fuel, food, construction supplies, hygiene products, and medicine.”
Chico Buarque, renowned Brazilian musician, Citlalli Hernandez, Senator and Secretary General of the Mexican MORENA party, Peter Mertens, President of the Belgian Workers’ Party, Judith Butler, feminist scholar, and Evo Morales, former Bolivian President, have already added their signatures to the campaign.
Citlalli Hernández Mora, Senator and General Secretary of Morena, said of the campaign, “This is an invitation to gather more than 1 million signatures. For all of us who are aware of what is happening in Cuba, of the measures being taken by the US government and their effects on the Cuban people, to sign this form, in this campaign to Let Cuba Live, because no person in the world should be subjected to the decisions of another country, secretly powerful, to prevent the possibility of living in peace.
Ernesto Samper, former Colombian president, and one of the signatories of the campaign declared: “Biden must take Cuba off the list, because Biden understood with President Obama that unilateral sanctions at the international level are illegal, immoral, and inhumane and that is why they initiated a historic process of normalization of relations between the two countries that could have been the beginning of the end of the blockade.”
