Senate committee forwards request for feds to intervene in Cuban ‘atrocities’

President Joe Biden and Congress will be called on to go to the United Nations to stop atrocities and genocide in Cuba, according to legislation that received committee approval Tuesday.

It goes to the full Senate next.

Spurred by the uprising in Cuba last July when Cuban protesters took to the streets and the crackdown that followed, Republican Rep. Tom Fabricio introduced the legislation (CS/HM 43); it was adopted by House resolution Feb. 9. And Tuesday, Sen. Ileana Garcia took it up in front of the Senate Rules Committee.

“The Cuban government continues to repress all peaceful attempts by the Cuban people to bring democratic change to the island nation by denying universal civil liberties,” Garcia said. “People are forced to live under the total falsehood of the social, communist Marxist construct.”

The legislation urges the President and Congress to call an emergency meeting with the U.N. Security Council to address the crackdown, which the legislation says, is “killing its citizens, torturing and silencing the will of its people,” the legislation says.

The memorial says the Cuban government is “using torture, violence and intimidation, and is withholding food, water, medicine, electricity, education and communication to the outside world in order to strangle the population into submission.”

The legislation also alleges that the Cuban government has used human trafficking, child labor, indoctrination, harboring terrorists, and terrorist activities.

Garcia said that she and other Cuban Americans “are the dignity of the people being trampled.”

“Once repressed, Cubans now call themselves Americans and live free in this country,” Garcia said. “My people demand freedom. We will no longer shout, ‘Give me country or give me death.’ We want country, freedom, life.

“Patria y vida,” she said, evoking the hip-hop protest song that, translated,  means, “homeland and life.”