UN again demands end to US embargo on Cuba
United Nations, Nov 3 (EFE).- The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Thursday to demand that the United States end its economic embargo against Cuba.
The island’s Communist government has proposed the resolution every year since 1992 and on each occasion, it has been approved by a large majority of the 193 UN member-states.
The latest resolution passed Thursday by a vote of 185-2 with two abstentions. Only Israel joined the US in voting “no,” while Brazil and Ukraine declined to take a position.
In 2016, during the thaw between the US and Cuba under then-President Barack Obama, Washington’s representative to the UN abstained on the anti-embargo resolution.
But the US returned to its traditional position under Donald Trump, who not only reversed most of the steps taken by Obama to improve ties, but extended and intensified the embargo.
While Democrat Joe Biden – who was Obama’s vice president – spoke during the 2020 campaign of abandoning Trump’s punitive approach to Cuba, he has made no substantive change to the policy since succeeding Trump in January 2021.
The six-decade-old embargo is a “deliberate act of economic war” with effects equivalent to “a permanent pandemic, a constant hurricane,” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez told the General Assembly.
He said that with the tightening of the embargo by the Trump administration in 2019, Washington “has escalated the siege around our country, taking it to an even crueler and more inhuman dimension, with the purpose of deliberately inflicting the biggest possible damage on Cuban families.”
The foreign minister took the opportunity to call on Biden to make a clean break from Trump regarding Cuba.
“The current US administration does not have a policy of its own toward Cuba,” Rodriguez said. “It acts out of inertia and continues the inhuman policy of maximum pressure instituted during the presidency of Donald Trump.”
Damage to the Cuban economy as a result of the embargo over the the first 14 months of the Biden administration amounted to $6.35 billion, or more than $15 million a day, the foreign minister said.
EFE
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