Today, at 9:00 a.m., Cuba time, the battle in Geneva will resume. The enemy has a number advantage that is difficult to surpass, broken down as follows in the votes of these groups of countries:

The United States and Canada – the hegemonic superpower and a rich neighbor, relatively peace-minded, but totally dependent on the former in the economic field, and at the risk of becoming disintegrated and consumed by the aggressive and voracious imperial system with which it is compelled to coexist;

NATO’s Europe and the Economic Community, several of whose States provided military support for the conquest war in Iraq, despite the fact that it almost completely nullified the feeble control that they could have over the Persian Gulf and the Middle East oil;

A group of former socialist countries in Europe – recently admitted into NATO and the Economic Community – with a disgusting and particularly aggressive behavior against whatever reeks of socialism, at the unconditional service of the superpower;

Miserable Latin American puppets, such as the Governments of Peru, Uruguay and Costa Rica, which are models of abjection and betrayal;

Mexico and Chile, as reported, whose Governments will never do anything to curtail the annexation and consumption of our hemisphere by the United States through bilateral free trade arrangements, such as NAFTA and the FTAA;

Finally, the governments of various Third World countries facing a dire economic situation – which barely have some room to withstand the terrible pressures and threats of the masters of the world. This menial task has been endorsed by former colonial powers of divided and humiliated Europe.

The superpower – virtually destroying the authority and prerogatives of the United Nations – unleashed a war not against a government that it was not entitled to attack, overriding the Security Council, but against a people and its territory, which has the world’s third largest reserve of hydrocarbons; against a nation; against a culture; against a religion, through the use of sophisticated, mighty and deadly weapons (including some that are banned because of their extreme cruelty, such as the cluster bombs), leaving thousands of victims in its wake, many of which were whole families, women and children, with atrocious injuries, mutilations and deaths, whose images have been seen by billions of people and have stirred the largest demonstrations around the world, particularly in the cities of the US itself.

  Even though such event has considerably undermined the prestige and authority of the superpower, it still has enough allies and accomplices to impose infamous draft resolutions on this institution that calls itself Commission on Human Rights, despite the opposition of countries like China and India and others from whole regions containing 80% of the inhabitants of the world, including the planet’s poorest and most forgotten.

Whatever the final result of today’s session, our people – with its courage and steadfastness, the support of the brightest leader of the world and the encouragement of the truly revolutionary and progressive forces – has already attained in this confrontation a historic victory as part of its battle of ideas against those who from the giant power of the great nation whose government they have encroached are trying to impose a global fascist tyranny on the rest of the world, as denounced last 12 April by over 400 figures and representatives of Cuba’s intellectual society, gathered in the Expanded National Council of Cuba’s National Union of Writers and Artists, when an appeal was made to the men and women of goodwill around the globe to establish an International Anti-Fascist Front.

Conditions have been ripening expeditiously and the stage is set for the emergence of the essential awareness instrumental in preserving humankind against the mortal dangers hanging over it.

The battle in Geneva proves that ideas can and must overcome weapons for a better world to be possible.

The tens of thousands of US intellectuals and artists that signed the Statement of Conscience "Not in Our Name" indicate that the sons and daughters of the noble people of the United States will undoubtedly be in the first ranks of the fighters for a better world.

17 April 2003