Cry freedom from Cuba

In Cuba, Fidel Castro condemns globalisation and supports the Palestinians. Israel responds with an unusual discourtesy, writes Mahmoud Murad from Havana
Over the week of 5 April, Cuban leader Fidel Castro hosted the 105th Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in the Cuban capital, Havana. In his keynote address to the assembled delegates, Cuban leader Fidel Castro strongly denounced the globalised market economy as a 'dismal', US-imposed horror. Recalling his assessment of globalisation to the 68th Inter-Parliamentary Conference in 1981, Castro asserted that as then, the trend is from bad to worse. "In 1981, I made a statement that might have seemed excessive: 'if the present is tragic, the future looks dismal.' I was not exaggerating," said the Cuban leader, who went on to prove his point with a mass of UN and World Bank (WB) data.
According to the international agencies' figures, the developing world's foreign debt, which totalled some US$500 billion in 1981, reached $2.1 trillion in the year 2000.
As a result of growing debt and its staggering service cost, unemployment, hunger and disease are rising throughout poorer nations, where one in every three people lives in poverty. In 1981, 570 million people were "undernourished" according to international agencies' definitions. In 2000, 1.6 billion were suffering. Undernourishment and malnutrition have affected an entire generation of children. According to one United Nations study, carried out between 1987 and 1998, two out of every five children in poorer countries suffer from retarded growth. One in every three is underweight.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been the most affected by the growing poverty. Infant mortality rates of 107 per 1000 live births are the highest worldwide. Almost one in three sub-Saharan Africans will die before they are 40.
Following his condemnation of globalisation and the market economy, the Cuban leader denounced the United States' disastrous new foreign policy course, including its latest veto of the draft UN resolution proposing the establishment of an observer force for the protection of the Palestinian people. Castro specifically criticised the Bush administration's position, and stressed that the US veto of the UN Security Council resolution was consistent with the American government's record on Palestine. "Since 1972, the US has used its veto on 23 occasions against resolutions aimed at solving the Palestinian issue. The last time the US applied its veto was on 21 March 1997 in support of Israeli interests and to the detriment of the Palestinians, against a resolution demanding that Israel stop the building of a settlement in East Jerusalem," Castro recalled.
Following the Cuban leader's keynote speech, Ricardo Alarcon, speaker of the Cuban Parliament, took up the Palestinian theme. Alarcon argued that support for national liberation movements should be included among the Conference's main resolutions. Alarcon specifically referred to the Palestinians. Condemning the Israeli occupation, Alarcon called for the evacuation of Israeli troops and the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
Though applauded and seconded by the majority of delegates, Alarcon's support of the Palestinian cause was to have repercussions. When Alarcon was nominated to chair the Conference, a standard courtesy extended to the host country's speaker of parliament, Me'ir Sheetrit, Israel's minister of justice and a conference delegate, objected strongly. In an attempt to disqualify the Cuban Parliament speaker, Sheetrit argued that Alarcon could not chair objectively since he described Israel as an "occupying country".
Dr Ahmed Fathi Sorour, the head of the Egyptian delegation, was quick to respond to Sheetrit's intervention. Defending Alarcon's position, Sorour said that Alarcon had only summarised a plethora of UN resolutions on the Palestinian people's legitimate right to self-determination. Sorour concluded by condemning the Israelis' disregard of the principles of international law, in addition to their gross violation of human rights in the occupied territories. Most Conference delegates agreed.
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