US officials linked to the execution of Washington´s over 50 year old economic and commercial blockade against Cuba affirm that it’s a measure “of bilateral relations” between both countries.
It is common, especially when, as been happening for the last 20 years at the UN General Assembly, the issue of the blockade becomes a special event and the White House must face the condemnation of the world.
But the truth is that the measure attempts to strangle Cuba by starvation and hardship and nothing related to “an affair between the two” … on the contrary.
In the same extent that it seeks to prevent the largest Caribbean island to broaden its commercial ties and attempts to meet their needs in other markets outside the U.S., the repressive USA Made actions is extended by force to other areas with the objective of sabotaging the operations of these contacts with Havana.
Certainly, the Torricelli and Helms Burton Laws, 1992 and 1996 respectively, were more comprehensive and specific in terms of curbing Cuban ties with foreign suppliers, but that arrogant and interventionist policy is an inseparable part of the blockade from the very beginning of the early 1960’s.
We should not forget, for example, that among the first measures of the hostile policy were the sanctions to the owners of any ship that move goods to or from Cuba, prohibiting them from touching U.S. ports for a long period of time.
Or the persecution of Cuban accounts in foreign banks, cutting the island’s relations with international lenders, and the prohibition of referring to the island any material with US components among other decisions trying to hinder trade with third countries.
Then, with the onset of the Torricelli and Helms-Burton Acts new steps were taken executing end of trade between Havana and U.S. subsidiaries and companies based in other nations, and even programmed sanctions against directors of foreign companies linked to Cuba, as well as their families. These coercive measures included, for example, prohibiting these executives and their families, the entry into the United States.
In other words, the economic blockade has never been nor will be a problem for a third party as some U.S. spokespeople like to portray in the world’s mass media.
And in our day and more in a globalized world it is illusory to believe that to destroy a nation is achieved from radical unilateral aggressive steps.
The planet was a cluster of villages with no ties between them, where a fence around a military fortress was a fact not known some hundreds kilometers away. And certainly Washington, in its struggle to destroy Cuba, applies an obsessive and overbearing siege with much broader implications than those of the old military adventures
