Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel accused the U.S. government of using “Nazi practices” and carrying out a “genocidal” policy against the island, saying Washington seeks to “strangle” the Cuban people to force a change of government and “take over the country.”
Speaking during the national ceremony marking the 73rd anniversary of the assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks, held Sunday in the western province of Pinar del Río, Díaz-Canel devoted much of his speech to denouncing the tightening of U.S. sanctions, arguing that Cuba is facing “a new Moncada” under a policy of “maximum economic strangulation.”
“State Department officials, experts at drafting sanctions, making lists and inventing pretexts, are a modern version of the authors of military edicts that became so feared and hated during the dark medieval period or the Nazi occupations in World War II,” Díaz-Canel said.
He said Washington is waging “a global war against the left” and described Cuba as “the capital of communism in the 21st century” in U.S. foreign policy.
He also said recent sanctions against officials in Cuba’s public health system and the country’s medical brigades represent a new escalation of pressure on the island.
“The latest sanctions break the record of infamy by targeting public health officials and Cuban medical services,” he said.
Díaz-Canel also contended the United States has “deliberately” designed a policy aimed at causing the country’s economic collapse.
“I denounce that Cuba is the victim of a coldly calculated genocide. The U.S. government has consciously designed and implemented a policy of maximum economic strangulation against the Cuban people,” he said.
The president attributed the country’s energy crisis, prolonged power outages, medicine shortages and the difficulties facing the healthcare system to that policy.
According to Díaz-Canel, the situation has prevented more than 100,000 scheduled surgeries from being performed and has forced thousands of patients, including children with cancer, to receive alternative treatments because of a lack of access to first-line medicines.
He also said the U.S. economic embargo constitutes “a weapon of war” and blamed Washington for the deterioration of living conditions on the island.
In another of the speech’s strongest passages, Díaz-Canel compared Cuba’s situation with other international conflicts and warned about the consequences of accepting sanctions imposed by the United States.
“First it was Gaza, Lebanon, Iran; today it is Cuba. Tomorrow it could be any other nation,” he said.
He also accused the United States of trying to manufacture international consensus for a possible military aggression through a recent State Department report, which he described as “a mediocre propaganda pamphlet.”
Despite the economic crisis, Díaz-Canel called for maintaining national unity, defending the socialist system and accelerating the economic reforms promoted by his government, which, he said, must be carried out “without abandoning social justice.”
The speech was held during the main political commemoration of Cuba’s revolutionary calendar, marking the assault on the Moncada Barracks led by Fidel Castro on July 26, 1953, which is considered the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.
