Association President Abebe Ayalew spoke at an event on the 71st anniversary of the attacks on the Moncada (Santiago de Cuba) and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (Bayamo) garrisons at the Cuban Embassy in Addis Ababa. He said that Cuba’s inclusion in Washington’s spurious list is absolutely unjustified and unacceptable.
Days before leaving office in January 2021, then President Donald Trump included Cuba in that list, from which the Caribbean island had been excluded in 2015, during the Barack Obama administration.
Trump added to his maximum pressure policy a coercive measure that he left to his Democratic successor, still unable to lift it, as an inheritance.
Regarding the anniversary remembered on this day, he assured that he is one of nearly 5,000 Ethiopians (Ethio-Cubans) who studied in the Caribbean island, because it is the basis of the Cuban Revolution and the essence of their training.
“That is why, we enshrine the belief that this country, our second homeland, has been an example for the world in terms of solidarity. You cannot mention a single epidemiological event in which Cuba’s presence has not been noted,” he asserted.
Ayalew recalled that when the rest of the nations succumbed to the impact of an unknown disease like Covid-19, Cuba created its own vaccine candidates and opened itself to cooperation with the rest of the countries to help fight the disease.
As a friendship association founded in 1978, he revealed that the organization’s objectives are to strengthen relations between both peoples, transmit history from generation to generation and the ambition to build a hospital in Addis Ababa where Cuban and Ethiopian doctors work together, in addition to offering improvement courses in various specialties, as well as facilitating knowledge and technology sharing, he added.
The rally was chaired by Deputy Foreign Minister Elio Rodríguez Perdomo, and was attended by members of the Cuban Embassy here, fellow nationals who reside in Ethiopia, the charge d’affaires of Nicaragua in Addis Ababa, Alí Waters, as well as members of the Venezuelan Embassy.
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