To promote a peaceful transition to a Cuba that respects human rights
and political and economic freedoms
Regimes in Havana and Tehran announce they are working together on a COVID-19 vaccine. Providing context to this announcement
The English pro-Iranian regime publication Financial Times: First Iranian English Economic Daily reports that regimes in Cuba, Iran are working together on a COVID Vaccine. This should not come as a surprise. Cuba has a communist dictatorship founded by the Castros beginning in 1959 and Iran an Islamist regime run by the mullahs since 1979.
Iran has been found to be engaged in the theft of intellectual property in the United States with high profile arrests of Iranian nationals in 2020 and 2018. ( Communist China, another ally of Havana, has an extensive track record of intellectual property theft and also collaborates with Cuba on biotech ventures. but is not the focus of this CubaBrief )
Despite claims by Havana the COVID-19 situation in Cuba is worsening, and are taking measures to contain the spread, but also using the crisis for political advantage and misinformation. The Castro regime is attempting block access to social media, to cut off independent reporting and are repressing and demonizing dissidents and journalists. They are taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to further repress the Cuban populace.
Foreign ministers representing regimes in Iran and Cuba meet in Havana November 2020
However they have a number of things in common: a profound anti-Americanism that portrays the U.S. as the great Satan, and a fossilized revolutionary tradition that systematically denies human rights to their respective peoples. Robin Wright referred to them as "melancholy twins" in The New Yorker in 2015. They also have a shared strategic outlook that is hostile to the United States. Although Cuba and Iran have regime's with different ideological origins, both are outlaw regimes with a history of sponsoring terrorism, and both are heavily involved in propping up the Maduro regime in Venezuela, and had a close relationship with the prior Chavez regime.
Consider the following highlights in relations between Havana and Tehran that stretch back 20 years.
Fidel Castro visited Iran on May 10, 2001, four months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, where he was quoted by the Agence France Presse at the University of Tehran boasting that "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees." ... "The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up."
Fidel Castro warmly received in Tehran by Mohammad Khatam
Iran's controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is a holocaust denier and who in 2007 at Columbia University told students that "in Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country" is a close friend of the Castro regime. Eleven years after Fidel Castro visited Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on January 12, 2012 in Havana, Cuba declared "our positions, versions, interpretations are alike, very close. We have been good friends, we are and will be, and we will be together forever."
No comments:
Post a Comment