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 Editorials | At Issue | October 2006 
US Blockade Genocidal and Deviant
 Prensa Latina
| | Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez speaks about a Cuban report released ahead of an upcoming vote on the embargo at the United Nations in Havana, Cuba, Monday, Oct. 2, 2006. The background reads ' The Bush Plan for Cuba's annexation, On May 6, 2004, President Bush announced his plan to annex Cuba.' (AP/Javier Galeano) |
Cuba´s First Assistant Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla explained to press Monday the details of a resolution Cuba will submit to the UN General Assembly urging cessation of a “genocidal and aberrant” policy, that of the US blockade.
In the year since the General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a similar resolution, the Cuban economy lost 4.19 billion dollars due to the intensification of the blockade imposed by the United States, he said.
For 12 consecutive years the UN has condemned this policy, nevertheless in 2005, the White House tightened the siege around Cuba with more vicious measures that have caused much damage.
“The need to put an end to the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the government of the United States of America against Cuba”, is the title of the document to be submitted to the UN on November 12, to ease the economic suffering of the Cuban people.
The more than 45 years of the blockade have cost Cubans more than 86.11 billion dollars, and the document notes it is the “most prolonged and cruel blockade in the history of humanity…and is an economic war that qualifies as genocide.”
Rodriguez explained that the extraterritorial nature of the blockade constitutes a true persecution of Cuba´s foreign commercial and financial operations. Not only may Cuba not export a single article to the United States and can only import certain very restricted food products encircled with red tape but, a company in another country cannot sell Cuba any product containing 10% of US components, nor sell to the US any product containing Cuban raw material.
However, the Cuban Foreign Ministry representative pointed out, the US commits “outright robbery” by allowing a firm to fraudulently produce and sell the world famous Cuban Havana Club rum in Florida.
Cuban companies are prohibited from using the dollar in international transactions and lack access to financial credit institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
US authorities have fined 487 US citizens or residents nearly 530,000 dollars for traveling to Cuba, an action Rodriguez called spurious, abusive and arbitrary. US studies report that if US citizens could visit, more than five million US tourists would come for an annual income of 7 billion dollars to the island.
All of this proves, he said, that the Helms-Burton Act and other legislation are applied with such rigor to “cause hunger, desperation and suffering to our people” although it faces greater and greater world condemnation.
Public Forum Denounces US Terrorism against Cuba
ACN
Washington's double standards regarding its "fight on terror" was exposed by the Political Commission of the World Public Forum "Dialogue of Civilizations", underway in Greece.
Commenting on statements by participants on the September 11, 2001 terrorist acts in New York, Cuban journalist Reinaldo Taladrid denounced the US planning, financing and organization of countless violent actions against the Cuban people since January 1st, 1959, PL reported.
The Cuban journalist cited as an example the case of international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, one of the masterminds of the bombing in mid air of a Cubana airliner on October 6, 1976, off the coast of Barbados and which claimed 73 innocent lives.
"This infamous terrorist," stated Taladrid, "tried to destroy, with explosives, a building in Panama occupied by hundreds of people at an event with the presence of Cuban President Fidel Castro."
Posada Carriles also ordered the placing of bombs in Havana hotels and the island's other tourist resorts, recalled the reporter. |
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