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Cuban exiles called on President Joe Biden on Monday to act “decisively” to protect the Cuban people from repression and support their desire for change and urged him not to repeat President John F. Kennedy’s “mistake” of leaving them helpless.
At a press conference, also attended by exile organizations from Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Syria, the exiles reiterated their support for the “popular rebellion” unleashed on Sunday in Cuba and the call for a “national strike” on the island to bring down the regime.
“If Biden does not act, Cuba will soon be filled with Russian and Chinese advisors,” as happened in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Syria, said Orlando Gutiérrez, leader of the Cuban Resistance Assembly.
At the press conference, Gutierrez and the rest of the exile leaders said that “the Communist Party and the Castro family have to leave Cuba”, because that is what the people are demanding in the protests that broke out this Sunday on the island with their cries for “freedom” and “down with the dictatorship”.
In the words of former political prisoner Jorge Luis Perez, “Antunez”, that translates into “zero negotiation” with the current authorities in Cuba, headed by Miguel Diaz-Canel, who this Sunday urged “to combat” the supporters of the regime that emerged in 1959 after the triumph of the revolution led by Fidel Castro.
Gutiérrez reiterated the calls made this Sunday by the exile community in favor of an international intervention led by the United States to help and protect Cubans.
In the case of the United States, the leader of the Cuban Democratic Directorate, one of the organizations included in the Assembly of Resistance, said that the Biden administration can make use of a 1962 law that empowers it to use any means at its disposal to prevent the spread of communism.
It can also invoke the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR).
According to Gutiérrez, anything but what Kennedy did in the early 1960s, when he left the Cubans to their own devices in the face of communism.
According to data available to the Assembly of Cuban Resistance, of which organizations inside the island are part, there are “hundreds of detainees and many disappeared”, but even so, the protest centers remain.
The participants in the press conference stated that they will not abandon the Cubans who have “risen up against tyranny”.
Biden expressed his support for the Cuban people on Monday amid the protests that have erupted on the Caribbean island, which he described as “a call for freedom” in a “courageous” exercise of “fundamental rights.”
“The Cuban people are courageously exercising fundamental and universal rights,” Biden said in a statement released by the White House.
Biden also called for respect “for the right to peaceful protest and the right to determine their own future” of the Cuban people.
However, there is no indication that the Democratic administration is going to take action to harden the positions of the American government against Cuba, on the contrary, its statements have gone in the opposite direction, seeking rapprochement with the authorities of the island, as did former President Barack Obama.
