U.S. embargo has cost Cuba 89 billion dollars: FM
11:01, September 19, 2007
The United States' 45-year economic embargo on Cuba has cost the Caribbean nation 89
billion U.S. dollars, Cuba's Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told local media Tuesday.
On the basis of a report on the blockade, which Cuba will deliver to the United Nations,
Roque described the measures as the longest and most cruel embargo in human history,
adding that the international community completely backs Cuba against the negative effects
of the embargo.
The United Nations has condemned the measure for 13 consecutive years. In 2006, in the
most recent vote on the issue, 183 nations voted against the embargo and just four, including
the United States voted for it.
The blockade was written into law in 1962, three years after Cuban leader Fidel Castro took
power after a guerrilla war in the nation, but the blockade was intensified twice in the 1990s:
in the 1992 Torricelli Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act.
The United States bars third party nations from exporting goods with more than 10 percent
U.S.-made components and from exporting to the U.S. goods with any Cuban raw materials
whatsoever.
It also bars U.S. citizens or residents in the U.S. from traveling to the island, and bars Cuban
businessmen from using U.S. dollars in international transactions or borrowing from the
World Bank or the Inter-American Development Bank.
In 2006, Roque said, President Bush made the Helms-Burton Act ever more intense, aiming
to return Cuba to the time before the 1959 revolution and eliminate its social and political
changes.
"The U.S. blockade aims to cause hunger, desperation and suffering for our people," said he,
adding that it will create internal destabilization to bring down its socialist system.
"Source: Xinhua"