Stewart Stogel, Miami Herald

UNITED NATIONS -- Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla took to the United Nations General Assembly podium on Monday and almost immediately attacked the Obama administration as the source behind recent upheavals in Libya and Syria.

“While we debate here, another preventive war is taking place in Libya where the protection of civilians is used as an excuse to attack a sovereign state. The United States and NATO, supposedly to avoid a massacre, launched a military attack without there being any threat to international peace and security,” he said during the opening of the General Assembly.

Rodríguez later claimed that the conflicts in Libya and Syria were not only being fought by the U.S. military but by “financial and media emporiums.”  

In fact, since President Barack Obama assumed office, Rodríguez said the international state of affairs has actually worsened.

“The new change of regime operations model shows that the current U.S. and NATO military doctrines are even more aggressive than the previous ones and the so-called Euro-Atlantic periphery covers the entire planet,” he said.

The U.S. mission at the U.N. had no immediate reaction.

On the campaign by the Palestine Authority to gain U.N. membership, the Cuban foreign minister spoke to both sides.

“The General Assembly has a moral, political and legal obligation to ensure the recognition of an independent Palestinian state with the boundaries established before 1967 and with East Jerusalem as its capital,” he said.

But Rodríguez insisted the regime in Havana is not anti-Semitic.

“Cuba, a country with a small Jewish community condemns the historical injustice of anti-Semitism, the crime against humanity which was the holocaust and recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist,” he said.

“The United States has the moral, political and legal obligation to stop vetoing Security Council resolutions destined to protect the Palestinian civilians,” Rodríguez added.

Rodríguez insisted that 10 years after the 9/11 attacks the world is “even more insecure.”

Deception, torture, extrajudicial executions or assassinations, the disappearance of persons, arbitrary detentions and CIA secret renditions and European prisons have been impossible for Washington to hide, he said.

Ironically, Rodríguez asked the U.S. to free five Cuban “anti-terrorists” who were “unjustly” sentenced to serve “extreme” sanction at “spurious” trials.

The foreign minister confided that much of the Cuban requests to the White House will likely fall on deaf ears because “the electoral campaign for president has already begun.’’