Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Rips UN for Opposing Embargo on Cuba

On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, tore into the United Nations after the General Assembly voted its disapproval of the American embargo on Communist Cuba.

One would think that the representatives at the U.N. General Assembly live in a different universe from that of the Cuban people, Ros-Lehtinen said. The dysfunctional international body voted against the U.S. embargo on Cuba, yet continues to ignore the increase in arbitrary arrests and detentions of pro-democracy advocates. For example, a young rapper is sitting in one of Castros gulags on the verge of death on a hunger strike and the Ladies in White continue to get harassed and beaten on a weekly basis by Castros state security agents, and in fact just this weekend at least 30 members of the Ladies in White were unjustly detained as they again tried to march to church to pray for the release of their family members and for freedom for the island. The U.N. should have better used the time it spent debating the embargo to instead punish the Castro regime and the Kim Jung-Un dictatorship for violating U.N. sanctions when the two tyrannies were transporting military weapons through the Panama Canal this summer.

The sad reality is that this comes as little surprise when it was this very body that let a state sponsor of terrorism like Cuba run for a seat on its Human Rights Council and allowed Iran, a regime subject to U.N. sanctions for proliferation, to chair its disarmament conference, Ros-Lehtinen added. I commend our close friend and ally, the democratic Jewish state of Israel, for joining us in voting against this senseless resolution. Its vote reflects a sober understanding of the reality in Cuba that is utterly lacking in todays broken U.N. system, reaffirming how desperately in need of reform this body is.