Havana, Cuba.- Brazilian writer Leonardo Boff supports the open letter by French-Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet addressed to the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to demand the exclusion of Cuba from the list of States sponsoring terrorism.
Boff, a theologian and philosopher, founder of Liberation Theology, thus joins the more than four thousand signatures that support this noble and just initiative.
The letter was also signed by Belgian historian and economist Eric Toussaint, spokesman for the International Network of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM); by the former member of the European Parliament and Secretary of International Relations of the Communist Party of Spain, Manu Pineda, and by the Dominican researcher Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, director of the Caribbean Institute of Decolonial Thought and Research.
They were joined by the Puerto Rican professor and sociologist Agustín Lao-Montes; and the Argentine intellectuals Mario Goloboff and Pablo Vommaro, academic secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO).
Through a call, released at the beginning of this month by the Havana institution Casa de las Américas, the battle to exclude the Caribbean nation from that list also has the support of the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Argentine Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize winner.
In his letter, the writer and political analyst also asks the U.S. president to repair the “profound injustice committed on January 12, 2021 by his predecessor, Donald Trump, when, a few weeks after leaving the White House, he decided – without real legal basis – to re-inscribe Cuba on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT list, for its initials in English).”
For 65 years, despite the tensions between the United States and Cuba, not a single case of violent action occurring on US territory, sponsored, directly or indirectly, by Havana, can be cited. Not a single case!, the eminent intellectual specified.
The most atrocious consequences arise from the risk associated with any type of humanitarian aid, business, investment and trade that involves Cuba and, by extension, its citizens, he added.
The current wave of migration of Cuban expatriates to the United States, unprecedented in its magnitude, is perhaps the most illustrative example of the devastating impact and suffering caused by extreme and brutal measures against the Cuban economy, he said.
Mr. President, this situation has to end, Ramonet requested. You know, there is not a single valid and reasonable argument to accuse Cuba and keep its population under illegal and inhuman collective punishment.
You have the authority to, before leaving the White House, correct such cruel absurdity and remove Cuba from the SSOT list. Do it now!, indicated the prominent intellectual at the end of his letter, with the hope that Joe Biden will be up to this historic moment.