Cuba has the right to live without the blockade

On November 2, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved for the thirty-first time the resolution “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”.

187 countries, including India, voted in favour, while there were only two votes against, obviously from the United States and Israel. In addition, 53 countries intervened in the General Assembly debate to make public their rejection of this policy.

This is a vote in favour of the draft resolution presented, but in essence, it is a declaration in support of reason and justice, and an act of support for the Charter of the United Nations and International Law.

The Cuban government and people are deeply grateful for this position of international support. In the case of India, we are overwhelmed with gratitude for this position, which is expressed by the Indian government in its vote on the resolution, but whose solidary reflection we receive permanently through various organizations and many people representing the broad Indian society, who have expressed their rejection of the US blockade. This solidarity fills the feeling of friendship that unites both countries and will always find Cuba’s gratitude.

More than three decades have passed since the Assembly began overwhelmingly supporting this resolution each year. Nevertheless, the U.S. government persists in ignoring this claim.

For more than six decades, the U.S. government has not ceased in its purposes of depriving our country of indispensable financial income, depressing the standard of living of the population, imposing continuous shortages of food, medicines and other basic inputs and provoking economic collapse.

The blockade is an act of economic war in times of peace, aimed at annulling the government’s capacity to attend to the needs of the population, creating a situation of ungovernability and destroying the constitutional order.That is the nature and those are, from its origin until today, the purposes of this policy.

Anyone who denies the blockade as a massive, flagrant and systematic violation of the human rights of all our people and as the greatest obstacle to our development would be lying.

Between March 1, 2022 and February 28 of this year, the damages and losses caused by the blockade are conservatively estimated at 4,867 billion dollars.This represents a damage of more than 405 million dollars per month, and more than 13 million dollars per day.

This amount reflects the intensified impact of the blockade on Cuban exports, mainly in the tourism sector, the merciless persecution of the country’s banking and financial operations, the costs of geographic relocation of trade, the effects on production and services provided to the population and the obstacles to access advanced technologies.

In the absence of the blockade, Cuba’s GDP could have grown by 9% in 2022.

At current prices, the accumulated effects in more than 60 years exceed 159 billion dollars. If the calculation is made on the basis of the value of gold, they reach one trillion 337 billion dollars.

Since the second half of 2019, the US government has escalated the siege against our country to an extreme dimension, even more perverse and harmful and adopted measures to try to prevent fuel supplies to Cuba, stepped up attacks against Cuban international medical cooperation, increased harassment of commercial and financial transactions in third markets, and proposed to intimidate, with the extraterritorial application, in US courts, of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, investors and commercial entities from other countries.

In a globalized international economy, it is not only absurd, but criminal, to continue prohibiting the export to Cuba of articles produced in any of your countries, when they have 10% or more of U.S. components; and to prevent the import to the United States of products manufactured in the countries you represent, if they contain Cuban raw materials, intangibles or components.

The persecution has been reinforced by the arbitrary inclusion of our country in the State Department’s unilateral and infamous list of countries supposedly sponsoring terrorism, adopted by the previous Republican government and applied even by the current Democratic government.

Whoever tries to find any argument or reason in this measure will never find it. Of course, it is a political instrument. Our position on terrorism is unimpeachable and recognized. On the other hand, we Cubans know a lot about terrorist actions organized and financed from U.S. territory against our country. Therefore, the U.S. government lies and does enormous damage to international efforts to combat terrorism when it accuses Cuba, without any basis whatsoever.

It was a lethal measure against the Cuban banking and financial system imposed by the previous Republican government, which was added to the already traditional prohibitions on the use of the dollar and the incensive and obsessive persecution of financial transactions in other currencies; of trade and investments. Between January 2021 and February 2023, there were a total of 909 actions by foreign banks that refused to provide services to our country as a result of this new measure by Washington.

In addition, the reinforcement of the economic siege has been accompanied by a sustained media and communications campaign against Cuba in an attempt to capitalize on the shortages caused by the blockade and to project an absolutely false image of the Cuban reality, destabilize and discredit the country.

All of the above ratifies, once again, the criminal nature of the blockade and ratifies that the vote of each of the 187 countries that supported the resolution was an act of justice and defence of international humanitarian law.

Cubans, who have had to assume our development model under this systematic and prolonged aggression on the part of a superpower, know that there is no other way but to advance with our transforming and revolutionary effort, in the search for solutions to the irrational siege of the United States Government, renewing our country and diversifying and updating our economy in spite of the walls that the blockade tries to build around Cuba.

We are proud to see every day that those walls are disappearing with the international solidarity, human solidarity and friendship that many friends in India make us feel every day.