UNITED NATIONS (CN) — Voicing outrage at the breakdown of bilateral relations Friday as the United Nations General Assembly concluded its first week of debate, America’s former Cold War enemy offered the most biting critique of President Donald Trump.
“We remind him that the United States, where flagrant human rights violations are committed, which raise deep concern among the international community, has no moral authority to judge my country,” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla said Friday of Trump. “We reaffirm that Cuba will never accept any preconditions or impositions, nor will it ever renounce any of its principles.”
Trump’s threat to “totally destroy” North Korea sparked audible gasps across the General Assembly on Tuesday, but most world leaders mumbled mostly muted criticism after for fear of distracting from the threat posed by Kim Jong Un.
Cuba, on the other hand, voiced unequivocal outrage at what Parrilla called Trump’s “disrespectful, offensive and interventionist” speech.
“We reject the threat to ‘totally destroy’ the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the home to 25 million human beings,” Rodriguez Parrilla said. “War is not an option in the Korean peninsula; it would threaten the existence of hundreds of millions of persons in this area as well as in neighboring countries; it would lead to a nuclear war of unpredictable consequences.”
The bitter address stood in sharp contrast to the speech Rodriguez Parrilla delivered last year amid signs that U.S.-Cuban relations had been headed toward a warmer and more peaceful era.
Wrapping up years of normalization that increased trade between the two nations and eased travel restrictions that facilitated cultural encounters, then-President Barack Obama paid his historic visit to Cuba’s capital, Havana, in 2016.
After rolling back some of that progress in June, Trump unloaded on the communist archipelago on the world stage, labeling it a “corrupt and destabilizing regime” before the assembly.
“From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure,” Trump said on Tuesday. “Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.”
Rodriguez Parrilla responded in kind: The same Cuban minister who last year called for more “respectful dialogue” with the United States devoted the bulk of his speech today to denouncing his northern neighbor’s inequality and imperialism.
“On Tuesday last, President Donald Trump came here to convince us that one of his purposes is to promote the prosperity of nations and persons,” he said. “But, in the real world, the wealth owned by eight men altogether is equivalent to the wealth shared by 3.6 billion human beings, who make up the poorest half of humanity.”
Rattling off a string of statistics, Rodriguez Parrilla noted 69 out of the 100 largest entities in the world are transnational corporations rather than states, and the 10 largest have more money than the public revenues of 180 nations.
Denouncing Trump’s “exclusive and xenophobic” policies like his proposed wall at the U.S.-Mexican border, Rodriguez Parrilla also attacked the 45th president’s philosophy of the United Nations as a gathering of “patriots” pursuing their separate interests.