Over 10,000 World Figures Back Cuba

The exigency to United States of respect Cuba's sovereignty has been combined so far by 10,141 figures of the world, including nine Nobel prizewinners, artists, writers, academics, humanists and social fighters.

Just when August 14 marks a week of the broadcast in Havana of the document "Cuba's Sovereignty Must Be Respected," initially inked by over 400 people from 50 countries, more peoples of the world keep joining the document.

On August 7, Belgium theologian Francois Houtart read the text along with Cuban poet and Casa de las Americas' president Roberto Fernandez Retamar, and both denounced Washington's threats to the island's territorial integrity.

Signers criticized the George W. Bush government's position as a result of a President Fidel Castro's proclamation to the Cuban people, shortly after he underwent complicated intestinal surgery.

On July 31, the statesman informed on his health and provisionally delegated in First Vice President Gen. Raul Castro his responsibilities as leader of the State, government, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and the Communist Party.

As of this proclamation, US officials have made statements "more and more explicit on Cuba's immediate future," states the article signed by Nobel prizewinners Jose Saramago, Rigoberta Menchu, Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Zhores Alfiorov, among others.

Signers also repudiated statements by the White House spokesman Tony Snow, after those repeated by Bush, in which his government was "ready and anxious to give humanitarian, economic aid and that of other nature to the Cuban people."

"It is not difficult," states the document, "to imagine the nature of such measures and the announced aid, if they take into account the foreign policy's militarization of the current US administration and its situation in Iraq."