Mr. Parilla began by expressing her solidarity with Palestine and condemning what he described as “genocidal extermination and ethnic cleaning” of Palestinians by Israel.
He said that “a handful of countries and individuals have raised more wealth than the vast majority of all other combined countries”, the United Nations continue to be the most representative organization of the international community and must be protected and reinforced.
Mr. Parilla called for a new international order which guarantees “the right to development, sovereign equality, participation and representation of developing countries in the decision of global policy”.
He referred to the reform initiatives of UN80 of the Secretary General who, he said, need to strengthen the intergovernmental nature of the United Nations, and to improve his ability to better face the urgent challenges of today.
Reject “peace by force”
The international community, he argued, must reject the doctrine of “peace through the force” which is “equivalent to imposing the arbitrary will of American imperialism on everyone”, and would have the detriment of the values on which the UN was founded.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs also demanded the end of the economic blockade imposed in Cuba by the United States for more than six decades, which he described as “an economic war” aimed at depriving the Cubans of their livelihoods and their sustainability.
“Cuba faces a serious scenario of prolonged and daily power failures, difficulty providing food, insufficient availability of drugs, a reduction in public transport, limited community services and pronounced inflation, which erods real income.”
Parilla also warned of an imminent threat of war in the Caribbean and said that the deployment of American military forces in the region to fight crime and drug trafficking was a pretext and “a dangerous situation that violates international law”.
With regard to climate change, the Minister said that from the podium of the General Assembly, science and “decades of collective work” to protect the planet are questioned.
“If the unsustainable models of production and consumption of capitalism are not fundamentally modified, we will exceed the fateful threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius before 2030,” he said.
Referring to new technologies, Mr. Parilla said that with a small number of transnational companies imposing their operating systems and controlling what content is seen, read and heard: “We suffer from the dictatorship of the algorithm”.
He called on the UN to create common standards, in order to ensure that technology, in particular artificial intelligence, benefits everyone.
Originally published at Almouwatin.com
