Carlos Fernández de Cossio. Minrex

Havana, April 5 (RHC)—Cuba's Foreign Ministry reiterated on Monday its rejection of false allegations on the island included on the recently issued U.S. State Department's 2020 Human Rights report.

A press release on the Ministry's website states that the Director-General in charge of the United States at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, convened the U.S. Chargé d'Affaires, Timothy Zúñiga-Brown, to whom he conveyed his rejection of the misleading and politicized allegations made about Cuba in the report.

The Cuban official told the diplomat that the U.S. government is opportunistically taking advantage of such a sensitive issue as human rights for its policy of aggression against countries that do not subordinate themselves to the U.S. government and defend the sovereign right of their peoples to self-determination.

According to the press release, Fernandez de Cossio emphasized that the U.S. report is arbitrary and unilateral and is characterized by allegations and imputations that are untrue.

Concerning Cuba, the release added, the State Department repeats slanderous allegations that political groups in the United States, with extreme positions against the island, have made for years as pretexts for the promotion of hostile actions and the imposition of coercive economic measures aimed at harming the standard of living of the Cuban population and punishing them for their support of the political, economic and social system that the country has freely and sovereignly chosen.

The Director-General expressed that the flagrant and systematic violations of human rights in the United States and by the government of that country are well known and documented. These include racism, xenophobia, police brutality, prisoners' torture, prolonged imprisonment, the use of secret prisons, anti-Semitism, McCarthyism, and other forms of religious and ideological intolerance. This must be added to extrajudicial killings in various parts of the world and the arbitrary and prolonged detentions of innocent people.

He stressed that Cuba enjoys international prestige in the field of human rights, for the results it has achieved in the promotion and protection of these guaranties; for its tradition of cooperation with the mechanisms of the United Nations that are applied on a universal and non-discriminatory basis; and for the country's solidarity support to the efforts of other developing nations to protect the rights of their peoples.

Fernandez de Cossio recalled that Cuba was recently elected as a member of the Human Rights Council for 2021-2023 and is a party to 44 of the 61 international human rights instruments.

The press release concludes by stating that the Cuban diplomat urged the U.S. Government to cease its campaign to discredit Cuba on human rights and end this and other unilateral and interfering exercises on these issues.