Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, the Group fully and unequivocally supports the motion for a resolution we are now discussing. The Group protests with great indignation at the monstrous wave of repression that has crashed down on anyone who dares to dissent, disagree, think differently or create freely in Cuba. This incredible wave of repression reveals, to anyone still harbouring doubts or illusions, the true nature of the Cuban political regime. This is a totalitarian regime that could be called Orwellian, in other words, of the type imagined by George Orwell in his masterpiece entitled ‘nineteen eighty-four’. Once Cuban music, symbolised by Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer and their Buena Vista Social Club, was liberated we thought that we would also see the liberation of the spoken word – poetry –embodied by Raúl Rivero, a great poet who has been sentenced to twenty years in prison. And the liberation of political speech, personified by Elizardo Sanchez and Osvaldo Payá, to whom we awarded the Sakharov Prize. This is not, however, what has happened. We were deceived. The Cuban dictator has had intellectuals, journalists, political dissidents and members of the Varela project arrested and brutally repressed, using the usual pretexts and means employed by any common or garden dictatorship: spying on its citizens, arbitrary imprisonment, court-room farces and absurd sentences. There are no good or bad dictatorships, Mr President. All dictatorships are intrinsically evil. There is no point in grading them on a scale of evilness and calling Fidel Castro’s dictatorship ‘benign’. It makes no sense for the to call Fidel Castro’s dictatorship a ‘respectable’ dictatorship. I personally wish to protest against this! The cynical, barefaced and shameless breach of fundamental freedoms and human rights now represents a challenge and a provocation thrown down by Fidel Castro to all citizens and democratic countries. We must unite our efforts to isolate Cuba politically. I am not talking about economic isolation, because in fact the US economic embargo has provided the greatest excuse for the Cuban dictatorship. I am talking about moral and political isolation. We must support the dissident Cuban Elizardo Sanchez, who has spent eight years in Fidel’s prisons and heads the Committee on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, when he demonstrates exemplary courage by stating in an interview with a French newspaper on the subject of this wave of repression, that what is being called into question in Cuba – these are his words – ‘is the totalitarian model’, which has failed there as elsewhere, and calls it an obscene model, adding that the Cuban regime is in its final throes. These are troubled times for dictatorships, Mr President. I fervently hope that democracy will triumph in Cuba and that the admirable Cuban people will regain the freedom of assembly, the freedom of association, the freedom to demonstrate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to travel beyond their island. In short, I pray that the Cuban people recover the dreams which underpinned a revolution that I have always supported, but whose most important ideas have been betrayed and negated.

Political group: PSE