The figurehead “president” of the Cuban Communist Party, Miguel Díaz-Canel, reiterated on Monday the Party’s “unbreakable support” for the “Palestinian cause” as he met with his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, in Tehran.
Iranian media claimed that Díaz-Canel referred to Israeli anti-terror operations in light of the October 7 Hamas massacre of more than a thousand people as a “genocide”:
Neither Díaz-Canel nor Raisi are the heads of their respective geriatric dictatorships: Díaz-Canel answers to 92-year-old dictator Raúl Castro, while Raisi answers to 84-year-old “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The two, nonetheless, represent their regimes on the world stage, as their bosses typically refrain from travel.
Both Iran and Cuba are U.S.-designated state sponsors of terrorism. Iran funds a wide variety of jihadist terrorist organizations around the world and maintains a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as a wing of its armed forces. Cuba is primarily on the list for its support of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist narco-terrorist organization.
Díaz-Canel landed in Tehran on Sunday night for the first visit by a Cuban president to the country since late dictator Fidel Castro visited 22 years ago. Castro died in late November 2016, according to the Communist Party. The representative of the communist regime reportedly made it a priority to emphasize the Party’s opposition to Israel’s ongoing war against the Hamas jihadist terror organization, which Iran bankrolls to the tune of $100 million a year, according to the U.S. State Department.
The Cuban envoy “said Cuba slams Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian people and calls for the immediate establishment of a ceasefire in Gaza which would prepare the ground for the formation of an independent Palestinian state,” according to the Iranian state propaganda outlet PressTV. Hamas has made outlandish claims of thousands of deaths in the ongoing Israeli operation, but it and its supporters, including the governments of Iran and Cuba, reject condemnation for the atrocities Hamas terrorists committed against civilians in Israeli territory on October 7.
That day, the terrorist group invaded Israel and engaged in door-to-door raids of residential communities, killing entire families, abducting people as young as nine months old, and committing a variety of horrors, including torture, gang rape, and the desecration of corpses. Israel estimates that approximately 1,200 people, including children as young as infants, were killed in gruesome ways on that day. Following the attack, historians noted that the death toll of Jews was the largest in a single day since the Holocaust.
The Cuban Communist Party has yet to condemn the Hamas massacre at press time, while Iran routinely celebrates it. The regime organized a street party on October 7 to celebrate the killing of Jews, featuring fireworks, free lemonade, and chants of “death to Israel” and “death to America.” On Monday, covering Díaz-Canel’s visit to Tehran, PressTV described the terrorist onslaught as a legitimate military operation “against the occupying entity [Israel] in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.”
PressTV claimed that Díaz-Canel condemned “Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinian people” in Iran, referring to the military operation against Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization.
Raisi used the occasion of Díaz-Canel’s arrival to condemn America for its support for Israel, even amid tense relations between the Israeli government and left-wing American President Joe Biden.
“Regrettably, the United States and the West are supporting these heartbreaking crimes,” Raisi reportedly said, referring to the anti-Hamas operation.
Díaz-Canel’s visit to Tehran is a reply to Raisi visiting Havana in June and offering full-throated support for the popularly detested communist regime in Cuba.
“The conditions and circumstances in which Cuba and Iran find themselves today have many things in common,” Raisi declared at the time. “Our cooperation on the road to progress can create hope in independent nations and despair in hegemonic powers.”
On Monday, the two countries reportedly signed seven agreements for economic cooperation.
“Official conversations were very pleasant, an expression of the solid ties of fraternity between our nations,” Díaz-Canel celebrated on Twitter. “The energy, agricultural, and health fields were identified as having great potential in strengthening the economic, commerical, and cooperative nexuses between Cuba and Iran.”
“We also agreed on the unbreakable support for the Palestinian cause,” he added:
Las esferas energética, agroalimentaria y de salud se identifican con gran potencial para fortalecer los nexos económicos, comerciales y de cooperación entre #Cuba e #Irán. pic.twitter.com/fkaeLVOTTx
— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) December 4, 2023
Díaz-Canel is on a tour of the Middle East, which will culminate in Iran and began in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he attended COP28, the United Nations climate alarmism conference. He then made a stop in Qatar, where Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani declared Doha’s ties to Havana “historic, ancestral, a relationship that honors us much to have,” according to Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba.
There, too, Díaz-Canel offered support for the pro-Hamas cause. According to al-Thani, the two leaders “discussed the latest developments in the situation in Gaza.” He added, “And we will work together to increase the coordination of our joint efforts in international forums to detain Israeli aggression.”
In Cuba, the communist regime has attempted to interest the general public in the pro-Hamas cause with little results. In late November, the Castro regime lit up Havana’s “plaza of the revolution” in the colors of the Palestinian flag and held a sparsely attended “peace” concert in support of Hamas:
Nosotros no estaremos entre los indiferentes.#FreePalestine 🇵🇸 🇨🇺 #Cuba pic.twitter.com/OYPsEgnFzs
— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) November 18, 2023
“The United Nations Security Council must fulfill its mandate and put an end to the impunity of Israel, the occupying power, in which the United States has historically been complicit by repeatedly obstructing the body’s action, undermining peace, security and stability in the Middle East,” the Cuban Communist Party said in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas slaughter on October 7.