Your excellency , Mr. President of the United States of America,
I am adressing you on behalf of many medical colleagues and signatory organizations in Europe, to ask you to remove Cuba from your alledged “List of States Sponsoring Terrorism”, when you will be reviewing this list coming July.
This type of measures do not affect governments but severely harm people especially children which I, with colleagues from UK and Italy proved in our 2021 research, published in Britsh Medical Journal: Economic sanctions on countries are indiscriminate weapons and should be banned .* We expect you will take good notice of our research because you always claim to support and protect Cuban people.
Moreover with this measures you harm your own people by complicating – even impeding- cooperation between Science Institutes from Cuba and the United States. Example: US Covid mortality figures would have looked a lot better when the in Cuba developed Nosepray Vaccine against Covid-19 would have been tested and implemented in the USA since December 2020 **.
Also in Dutch and other European Medical Universities coordinated by our organization CEESE, there is a growing outrage because of US-government complicating exchange of European students by burocracy, refusal to transfer money and blocking scientific instruction material like MOOGS. When they ask me why Cuba is on before mentioned list, I cannot answer them because there is no evidence whatsoever. Colleagues and students are increasingly aware of the growing humanitarian disaster in Cuba fueled by the Cuba-blockade and Cuba’s position on forementioned list, which tarnishes the positive reputation of USA and its scolars in European academical environment.
Finally, we support the rejection by the UN General Assembly, the 20 US-based Church Organizations, the Brussels’ International Tribunal of legal experts of November 17 , 2023 and many others, of both the blockade as wel as Cuba’s inclusion on the alledged “List of States Sponsoring Terrorism”.
We ask you once again to remove Cuba from the alledged ” List of States Sponsoring Terrorism”.
We need peace, cooperation and solidarity to cope with common threads as climate change, growing inequality and depletion of natural resources, not war, building walls and blockade.
Paul Jonas MD. MSc.
Secretary of Cuba-Europe Medical Education and Science Exchange group (CEESE)
*Reference: Choonara I, et al. BMJ Paediatrics Open https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjpo-2021-001350
** Reference: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore USA: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality Covid -19 death rate until 3-10-23: Cuba 75,31/100.000 and USA 341,11/100.000 inhabitants.
List of signatories: