President Irfaan Ali spoke eloquently and movingly at the recent LAC-EU meeting in France. His address to the leaders from the LAC and EU countries expressed Guyana’s gratitude to Cuba for standing with Guyana through thick and thin. Under the PPP, Guyana has not only mouthed-off on a nonaligned policy, but our policies and actions have shown that our country will be friends with countries that are on the so-called left and right.
Guyana has strong relations with North American and European countries, and with countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and across the Americas. While there are hostilities between Israel and some Middle East countries, Guyana enjoys strong friendly relations with both Israel and all the Middle East countries. We have equally strong relations with Cuba, China and America. Guyana’s foreign policy is not based on other countries’ friends and foes.
While our relationship with America has never been stronger and more based on mutual respect, we have not weakened in any way our bonds with Cuba. With an even stronger relationship with America, Guyana has not refrained from insisting that America ends its economic and political embargo against Cuba. In November 2022 at the UN, for the 30th successive year, Guyana voted with 186 other countries for America to halt the embargo. America and Israel were the only countries that voted against the resolution to end the embargo. Brazil and Ukraine abstained.
To be fair, America’s relationship with Guyana also has not been based on who our friends are. America has not coerced Guyana to abandon its bonds with Cuba. Indeed, in America itself, almost 60% of its citizens believe the time has come to end the embargo.
President Ali spoke directly to leaders and citizens of the EU and LAC, reminding them that Cuba has been there for countries when COVID-19 began its onslaught and killing spree around the world. When doctors, nurses, and health workers from many countries were afraid in the early days, when there were lockdowns and people could not travel, Cuban doctors and nurses came to the rescue of many countries. Guyana was one of the countries where Cuban doctors and nurses came to help.
Cuba did not ask for payment; Cuba only wanted to know if we needed help, and without bureaucratic hold-ups, they sent their own transportation doctors and nurses to our country. COVID-19 was not the first time, nor would it be the last time. We cannot forget that in many countries, particularly Africa, when HIV and AIDS were in the early days, when medicines were not available and AIDS was a death sentence, it was the Cuban doctors and nurses that provided much-needed help. In an expression of profound and extreme gratitude, President Ali reminded the world.
For more than sixty years now, Cuban doctors, nurses, and other first responders have been deployed into some of the most horrifying calamities in recent history. Earthquakes in Indonesia, Pakistan, Haiti, Turkey/ Cyprus; a cholera outbreak in Haiti, and the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, where they continue to gain admiration and international plaudits for their hazardous frontline work. In 2020, when hopelessness prevailed around the world as COVID-19 left a trail of corpses everywhere with an era-shaping catastrophe, Cuban doctors and nurses were on the ground once again in many countries, only this time in less common locations, such as Europe. In the midst of a catastrophe in Italy in early 2020, with dead bodies accumulating in Lombardy, 39 Cuban doctors arrived to provide care for COVID-19 patients.
Almost two years ago, President Lopez Obrador of Mexico expressed similar sentiments when he acknowledged Cuba’s humanitarian support to Mexico, the latest of which was Cuba’s support for Mexico’s COVID-19 response.
Many years earlier, President Nelson Mandela spoke of Africa’s gratitude to Cuba. President Ali was not timid in letting the world know that Guyana cherishes our bond with Cuba.
There are actually hundreds of thousands of doctors from developing countries that have been trained in Cuba or trained by Cuban specialists in medical schools around the world. In 1989, when Guyana’s School of Medicine was commissioned, it was the Cubans who made it possible. There are still more than a hundred Cuban doctors and nurses providing health-care to our people as part of the Cuban brigade.
The embargo is unfair. It is costing the Cuban economy about $US6B per year, or about $US15M per day. For more than sixty years, Cuba has endured this debilitating embargo. President Barak Obama realized that the embargo is punishing the Cuban people and had not provided an incentive for the Government to introduce reforms. President Trump reversed some ease in the embargo President Obama introduced. President Biden has preserved much of the hardening of the embargo introduced by President Trump.
As much as Guyana is on a trajectory to strengthen further our relationships with countries like America, Canada, Britain, the EU, Brazil, Israel, and other countries that have voted against removing the embargo, or have abstained over time, Guyana is not afraid to stand firm that Cuba must be free from the embargo.
Guyana, as it has with all our diplomatic relationships, has based its position on principle. Not only has Guyana been continuing to build its bonds with Cuba, but our President is also willing to speak out on behalf of our friends in that island country. We mean it when we say we are a non-aligned country. It is why our President can publicly insist we stand with Cuba. It is also why we can say definitively that we oppose the war in Ukraine.
