John Suarez in Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter:
Democratic Cuba’s forgotten role in lobbying for and drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Democratic Cuba’s leadership in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and lobbying for the establishment of a UN human rights commission in 1945.
One of the great lies of the Castro regime, and there are many, is the claim that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains rights that are alien to Cubans. Fidel Castro claimed that “[y]our political concepts of liberty, equality, justice are very different from ours. You try to measure a country like Cuba with European ideas. And we do not resign ourselves to or accept being measured by those standards.” However the Cuban dictator failed to mention that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an initiative led by Latin Americans, and Cubans in particular. Furthermore that language placed in the Declaration was taken from the 1940 Cuban Constitution. Cuban diplomats invited Winston Churchill to lunch at the Cuban Embassy in London in December of 1945 and proposed the creation of a human rights commission for the United Nations. Beginning in 1945 Cuba took part in the drafting of the declaration and submitted nine proposals of which five made it into the final document.
The late Bishop Agustín Román on December 16, 2006 spoke of this chapter in Cuban history and “the important role the delegation of the Republic of Cuba to the United Nations in 1948 in the drafting and promulgation of the Universal Charter, particularly by Drs. Dihigo Ernesto, Guillermo Belt, and Guy Pérez-Cisneros is a historical fact.”
The final draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was recognized by these Cuban diplomats as one that would have been “accepted by that generous spirit who was the apostle of our independence: Jose Marti, the hero who — as he turned his homeland into a nation — gave us forever this generous rule: ‘With everyone and for the good of everyone.’”
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Cuba went very far very fast between gaining independence and losing it. It was NOT normal for a “Latin” country to do that well, especially a small one with fairly modest natural resources. I suppose the over-achievers responsible for such accomplishment, who were always a minority, aroused enough envy and resentment that the majority was easy prey for cynical manipulators who promised “equality” and “redistribution” regardless of merit or ability. Alas, that ploy is very effective with certain people, who happen to be quite numerous, and in Cuba they were so numerous that they poisoned everything.
Unfortunately, for the most part, those are the people who stayed on the island, and naturally reproduced, so that they’re now an even greater if not overwhelming majority, with a much smaller and certainly weaker minority to counteract them. I’m not saying they cannot be salvaged, but they will make recovery and true normalization much harder and slower, since the degree of contamination or degeneration is quite high. Yes, exiles could help, to a point, but I wouldn’t count too much on that, not least because they will be seen with suspicion and even animosity by “natives” for a variety of reasons.
Basically, there was a catastrophic fall with enormous, prolonged and compounded damage, affecting everything, both physical or material as well as mental, psychological and behavioral. Rehab, I’m afraid, must wait for new blood untainted by the Castro plague to replace those on the island now–and needless to say, most of us will not be around to see that. Personally, I see Cuba, the authentic one, as a lost world like the planet Krypton (not that I see myself as any sort of Superman). Some vestiges remain and may persist, but the original entity is gone. What is now on the island is a form of Bizarro World.