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Cuban activists Amelia Calzadilla and Carolina Barrero are in Brussels to hold high-level meetings with the European Parliament, the European External Action Service, the Office of the Special Representative for Human Rights, and the permanent representations of the EU member states in the European Union.
Both represent the organization Ciudadanía y Libertad and have a central goal: urging the EU to suspend the Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement (PDCA) with Cuba and impose individual sanctions against those responsible for the regime's repressive apparatus.
"The goal of this trip is to request the suspension of the PDCA, a dialogue that only benefits the dictatorship in its double standard rhetoric. The positions of democratic countries must and have to be supportive of the people, not their oppressors," the activists stated.
In documents presented to European institutions, representatives of Citizenship and Freedom argue that ten years of implementation of the PDCA have not produced any tangible results in terms of human rights or political openness on the island.
This visit to Brussels comes weeks after Calzadilla appeared before the Basque Parliament on March 26 to denounce the situation of political prisoners and the systematic repression exercised by the Cuban government.
Activists have also emphasized to their European counterparts that Cuba had 1,214 political prisoners as of February 28, a number that makes the regime one of the most repressive in the Americas.
In this context, the representatives of Citizenship and Liberty have described the Cuban government as the chief ally of Vladimir Putin in the Western Hemisphere, an argument aimed at strengthening the urgency for a firm response from European democracies.
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