Cuba on Monday denounced the targeting of its Paris embassy as a “terrorist attack” encouraged by the US after the building was bombarded with Molotov cocktails.
Firefighters in the French capital said two incendiary devices were thrown at the embassy in the city’s 15th arrondissement, causing minor damage.
“We denounce the Molotov cocktail terrorist attack against our Embassy in Paris @EmbaCubaFrancia,” Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodriguez wrote on Twitter. “I hold the US government responsible for its continued campaigns against our country that encourage this behavior and for its calls for violence, with impunity, from its territory.”
Photo: AFP
Firefighters said that they were alerted to the attack after midnight and “the devices, which caused minor damage, were extinguished before [firefighters] arrived.”
Police did not immediately provide any more information.
Three Molotov cocktails — two of which reached the embassy’s facade and another that made it into the building — struck the building at 11:45pm and started a fire that was quickly put out by the mission’s employees, the ministry said.
Demonstrators marching in favor of and against the Cuban government took to the streets in cities all over the world this weekend and on Monday, coinciding with Cuba’s July 26 national day commemorations and just two weeks after anti-government protests erupted throughout the nation.
About two dozen nations, including Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, on Monday joined US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in calling on the Cuban government “to respect the legally guaranteed rights and freedoms of the Cuban people” and to “release those detained for exercising their rights to peaceful protests.”
The “statements of the US secretary of state are based on the support of a handful of countries that have been pressured to accept his decrees,” Rodriguez wrote separately on Twitter.
“#Cuba counts the support of 184 nations that all call to #EndTheEmbargo,” Rodriguez wrote, referring to the US government’s sanctions that have been in place since 1962.
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