The Militant (logo)  
Vol.63/No.35       October 11, 1999  
 
 
Cubans at United Nations say: end the U.S. economic war  
{front page} 
 
 
BY MARTÍN KOPPEL 
UNITED NATIONS — Far from easing, Washington's economic war against Cuba "has continued to intensify over the past 40 years," declared Cuba's new foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, addressing the United Nations General Assembly September 24.

The Cuban leader introduced a resolution, to be voted on in the coming weeks, expressing opposition to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

For seven consecutive years, Pérez Roque noted, the General Assembly has adopted similar resolutions, each year by a wider margin.

In 1992 the vote on the resolution was 59 in favor, 71 abstentions, and 3 opposed. Last year it was 157 for, 12 abstentions, and only 2 against — Washington and the Israeli regime.

Pérez Roque began his address by highlighting the growing disparities in the capitalist world today, in which the most industrialized nations, "with only 20 percent of the world's population control 86 percent of its gross domestic product, 82 percent of world export markets, 68 percent of direct foreign investments, and 74 percent of all telephone lines." In the United States, Sweden, and Switzerland there are 600 phone lines per 1,000 inhabitants, but Cambodia, Chad, and Afghanistan have only one line per 1,000 inhabitants, he noted.  
 

Ballooning Third World debt

The Cuban leader pointed to the ballooning debt by Third World countries to international banks, which now stands at $2 trillion and continues to grow. It is "devouring almost 25 percent of our export earnings just to cover interest payments. How is development possible under such circumstances?" he asked.

Under this crushing debt burden, the government of Tanzania, for example, spends nine times more on interest payments to imperialist bankers than on primary health care, and four times more than on primary education.

The Cuban leader denounced the imperialist governments' hypocritical campaign against the use of "small weapons." He asked, "Why is there no discussion in this hall about general and complete disarmament, including nuclear disarmament? Why is the issue limited to controlling small arms, which are needed, for example, by Cuba, a country attacked and blockaded for 40 years? Why is there no mention of the deadly laser-guided bombs, the depleted uranium shells, or the cluster or graphite bombs used indiscriminately by the United States in Kosovo?"

Pérez Roque excoriated Washington and other imperialist powers for justifying its assaults on Yugoslavia and elsewhere on the basis that the right to national sovereignty no longer applies when those powers decide to unleash what they call a "humanitarian intervention."

The Cuban representative reiterated the revolutionary government's position that the United Nations Security Council setup, with each of five major powers holding veto power, is undemocratic. He called for an expansion of the council to include two or three new permanent members from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.  
 

40 years of confronting U.S. aggression

Turning to the situation facing Cuba today, Pérez Roque pointed out that the aim of Washington's policy "is to destroy the political and economic system that the Cuban people have built by their own free will and to reestablish its neocolonial rule over Cuba, which that power lost forever on Jan. 1, 1959, with the triumph of the Cuban revolution."

Pérez Roque noted that the U.S. rulers reacted with hostility to the revolution from the start. The May 1959 agrarian reform law, through which hundreds of thousands of peasants gained land, "sparked an extreme reaction by the United States, whose companies owned a large part of the best and most fertile Cuban land." Washington soon launched its first attacks against the revolution, such as cutting off purchases of Cuban sugar.

More recently, the foreign minister explained, the U.S. government passed the Torricelli Act in 1992, and the Helms-Burton Act in 1996. These measures tighten the U.S. embargo in a number of ways, including sanctions against subsidiaries of U.S. corporations abroad and companies based in third countries that do business with Cuba. Since then, other measures have been tacked onto U.S. government budget appropriations bills that make it more difficult and costly for Cuba to obtain needed goods from other nations.

The U.S. Senate recently passed an amendment to a farm spending bill, sponsored by Sen. John Ashcroft, that would allow agricultural businesses and pharmaceutical companies to apply for one-year licenses from the U.S. president to sell their products to Cuba. The amendment includes several restrictions including a ban on the use of U.S. government loans in such sales. Approval of the measure remains in question, however, since a joint House-Senate conference committee has stalemated on it.

Current U.S. policy allows licenses for sales of food and medicine to Cuba, but medical sales must be monitored by U.S. authorities and agricultural sales cannot be made through Cuba's state institutions, making trade virtually impossible.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration is using the Helms-Burton law against its capitalist rivals in Europe. It is threatening sanctions against three European companies — Sol Meliá of Spain, the French-based Club Med, and the German firm LTU — on the basis that their hotels in Cuba are built on land claimed by a wealthy Cuban-American family whose vast landholdings were expropriated by Cuban peasants and workers decades ago.

Pérez Roque reported that Cuba's National Assembly had adopted a declaration September 13 that termed Washington's embargo "an international crime of genocide," citing international conventions that bar the deprivation of food for civilians in war. The declaration called for trying and punishing those U.S. officials responsible for carrying out the embargo.

The Cuban foreign minister described the civil lawsuit that several mass organizations in Cuba have filed in a Havana court against the U.S. government. The suit demands "reparations and compensation for losses and damages resulting from the 3,478 Cuban citizens who have died and the 2,099 survivors who have been left disabled as a consequence of the covert plots and dirty war waged by the United States" over the past four decades, from armed attacks to biological warfare and terrorist attacks on Cuba.

Pérez Roque introduced the nine members of the Cuban delegation accompanying him, including three national leaders of youth organizations, three prominent health-care professionals, and three religious leaders.

At the end of the General Assembly debate, in response to the foreign minister, U.S. deputy ambassador Peter Burleigh justified Washington's embargo against Cuba as a simple "trade ban" targeting the Cuban government for the alleged lack of human rights.

Hassán Pérez, president of the Federation of University Students (FEU), requested the floor to answer the U.S. representative. He pointed to opposition in the United States to Washington's embargo against Cuba, and added, "It's unheard-of that the biggest violator of human rights the world has ever seen can talk about human rights."  
 
 
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