By Circles Robinson
HAVANA TIMES – Once again the UN General Assembly called today on the United States to end its over 60-year embargo on Cuba. It was the 31st straight year of rejection of the embargo with a non-binding resolution.
A near unanimous 187 countries voted to end the sanction while only the United States and Israel opposed, with Ukraine abstaining.
Cuba is currently suffering a near economic meltdown with shortages of most basic food products, medicines, fuel, and energy combined with record inflation. Both agriculture and industry are highly unproductive as the government’s economic reforms since 2021 have only made matters worse. Likewise, tourism, a mainstay in the economy, has still not recovered close to pre-Covid levels.
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez told the UN Cuba’s woes are virtually all the fault of the “blockade” (what the Cuban government calls the embargo). Each year the government calculates the losses to the Cuban economy and calls it a genocide against the people. In 2022, Rodriguez said the losses from not having access to the US market equaled US $5 billion.
Rodriguez said the US policies were deliberately aimed at promoting suffering among the Cuban people in order to force a change in the government.
Farming and ranching are a key example. Despite officials’ speeches emphasizing the island’s sustainable agriculture policies and goals, the government has been importing 60-80% of basic food products for several years. The worsened crisis now is they don’t have the money to pay for the imports, while domestic food production continues to decline to the point that even sugar must be imported to cover rations. The same goes for rice, beans and coffee and a long list of other products.
The trade embargo, in place since 1962, is a mix of US laws and regulations that complicate financial transactions and the acquisition of goods and services from the US by the Cuban government. However, since 2001, the US has made exceptions with a waiver on food products and medicines which Cuba can import as long as they pay the US companies cash in advance. Reuters notes that US companies sold Cuba $295 million in agricultural products in 2022, mostly chicken, wheat, and soybeans.
While the Trump administration added additional stumbling blocks to US-Cuba exchange and negatively affected US citizen trips to the island, President Biden has made some good will gestures, allowing some group educational travel, recently reopening the US embassy for consular services, and supporting meetings to assist Cuban private entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, the groups working to end the embargo in the US have been disappointed that Biden has left in place several of the Trump sanctions.
The violent repression of large-scale citizen protests throughout Cuba in July 11, 2021, and the jailing and sentencing of hundreds of protestors, was said to give Biden cold feet about returning to greater rapprochement as occurred under Barack Obama.
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