Another year of economic warfare takes its toll
Campaign News | Tuesday, 29 October 2024
Voting record from the 2023 UN vote on the blockade
On 29 October the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will vote on a resolution calling for an end to the US’s economic, commercial and financial blockade of Cuba. Last year’s vote saw 187 countries, including Britain, vote in support of Cuba’s motion. Just the US and Israel voted against.
The overwhelming majority of the world’s nations, as they have done for the past 31 years, are expected to back Cuba’s call for an end to more than six decades of unilateral economic warfare waged against the island.
“A flagrant, massive and systematic violation”
Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX) published its annual report detailing the impact of the blockade in September ahead of the vote at the UNGA. It described the US sanctions as a “flagrant, massive and systematic violation of the human rights of more than 11 million Cubans. It is a cruel punishment policy.”
At a press conference in Havana launching the report, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez accepted that the difficulties currently facing Cuba are not entirely down to the blockade. “But anyone who does not identify it as the main obstacle to our development would be lying,” he said. Rodríguez argued that “no country, even with a much more prosperous and robust economy, should face such a ruthless aggression.”
This aggression has been intensified in recent years, largely as a result of Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) by the US government. As the report states, “this was a purely political move, with no evidence that could justify it” and has led to serious difficulties with Cuba’s “banking transactions, foreign trade, sources of income and energy, access to credits and [ability] to find suppliers of goods.”
From 1 March 2023 to 29 February 2024, the blockade caused material damages to Cuba estimated at just over $5 billion – up almost $190 million on the previous year. The impact of such losses, year on year, for a small, developing island in the Caribbean has been daily “shortages suffered by Cuban men and women, which include foodstuffs, medicines, fuels, means of transportation, as well as the deterioration of other basic services.”
Cuba’s people are suffering as a result. In January 2024, representatives of the United Nations Human Rights Council reported that the blockade is impacting Cuba’s ability to guarantee its people the fundamental right to food and an adequate standard of living. The sanctions are so far-reaching that they have even prevented the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation from purchasing $1.5 million-worth of tractors for small farmers. For the first time in its history, Cuba has been forced to ask the UN’s World Food Programme for assistance in providing powdered milk for children.
In education, the blockade continues to restrict Cuba’s ability to provide the most basic of supplies. The school year 2023-24 saw a deficit of nearly half a million school uniforms due to a shortage of raw materials. It also impedes educational collaboration across the world. The José Antonio Echeverría Technological University of Havana was due to receive a donation of computers and software worth around $300,000 as part of an international project with a British university. The project was stalled because the equipment violated an extra-territorial US law that prohibits companies from selling or donating to Cuba equipment containing more than ten per cent of US-made components.
It is perhaps in the health sector where the most profound impact of the blockade can be seen. Some of the statistics make for grim reading.
Over 50 per cent of the 651 medicines on the country’s National List of Essential Medicines are currently unavailable.
Before 2022, Cuba would try to ensure it had a 120-day stock of all medicines to cover the national demand. Now, it struggles to guarantee 30 days.
Cuba has had contracts cancelled to obtain medical oxygen, equipment needed to encapsulate medicines and regulate their temperature, and drugs used to treat brain tumours.
Only 65 per cent of the surgeries carried out in previous years could be completed during the twelve months covered by the report.
These sanctions represent a direct assault on what the report describes as “one of the pillars that the Cuban revolutionary process set out to guarantee since its early days… a free, universal and quality medical care for all citizens.”
The report notes that “on many occasions, due to the shortage of diagnostic means and therapeutic products, patients and their families must continuously move around various medical institutions, depending on the availability of supplies.” For many Cubans, “these are treatments that make the difference between life and death.”
Prelude to the vote – nations of the world stand with Cuba
On 28 September, Foreign Minister Rodríguez addressed the UNGA during the general debate and reaffirmed his country’s unequivocal rejection of the US government’s “pernicious attempts to determine and control the destiny of Cuba.”
He told the assembly that the US’s “complicit tolerance” of groups that organise violent and terrorist acts against Cuba from US territory, the unrelenting blockade and the spurious designation as a state sponsor of terrorism all “violate international law” and “contravene the purposes and principles of this organisation and numerous resolutions adopted by the General Assembly.”
The nations of the world are in agreement. Leaders and dignitaries, in a prelude to the vote on Cuba’s resolution, spoke in support of Cuba’s longstanding position. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, condemned the re-inclusion of Cuba on the state sponsors of terrorism list as unjustifiable, and President To Lam of Vietnam reaffirmed his solidarity with the state and people of Cuba, urging the US to lift the sanctions.
The foreign ministers of China, Mexico, Nicaragua, Eritrea, the Republic of the Congo and more joined the call for the end of the blockade. Amery Browne, Foreign Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, added: “It matters little what the objectives were 60 years ago. These measures have not yielded any desirable results, only pain and suffering for ordinary Cubans.”
Cuba’s report on the blockade makes clear that the pain and suffering of ordinary Cubans is worsening. With a US presidential election round the corner, the UNGA vote (and the inevitable resounding victory for Cuba’s resolution) will provide a timely reminder of the US’s isolation on the issue and make clear the necessity of lifting the sanctions is now more pressing than ever.
Read the full report in English.
Watch the debate live from the United Nations
