UN General Assembly
1972

49. Cuba is confident that this Assembly will approve the report of the Special Committee [Al8723jRev.l] and thereby authorize it next year to adopt and implement decisions regarding Puerto Rico. Few peoples in the world have earned such a clear-cut right to international solidarity as the people of Puerto Rico. In an unequal contest with an incomparably more powerful enemy, kept isolated from the general movement which led to American independence, the prey of all the furies of empire, the Puerto Rican people, the Boricuas, never yielded to their colonizers' assaults. Puerto Ricans offered this continent the longest gaoled political prisoners: Oscar Collazo, Lolita Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, Irving Flores, Bernardo Diaz Diaz, Juan Antonio Cruz Colon, Rafael Molina Centeno and Manuel Mendez Candia. Prisoners for over two decades, they are the living symbols of the unbreakable rebellion of that people. For keeping intact the spirit of their struggle, those nine patriots remain incommunicado, subject to all sorts of harassment, the victims of a hateful penal system.