Vol. 71/No. 43      November 19, 2007

The vote was nearly unanimous. Only the governments of the United States, Israel, Marshall Islands, and Palau voted against the resolution. Micronesia abstained.

The vote took place a week after the Bush administration announced three new measures against Cuba.

Waged for nearly half a century, the U.S. economic war against Cuba has caused $222 billion in losses for that Caribbean nation, said Cuban foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque during the General Assembly debate on the resolution.

This aggressive policy, he noted, goes back to the beginning of the revolution. It includes blocking Cuba’s access to medicines; needed industrial, farm, and transportation equipment; and cultural and sports exchanges.

Pérez Roque refuted the claim by U.S. delegate Ronald Godard that the embargo is a matter only between Washington and Havana and should not come before an international body. Pérez Roque pointed to several examples of the extraterritorial enforcement of the embargo affecting many countries’ normal trade relations with Cuba.

He cited the freezing of U.S. accounts in the Netherlands Caribbean Bank, a $164,000 U.S. fine on the British company PSL Energy Services for exporting equipment to Cuba, and the consequences of threats of sanctions, which prevented the Japanese company Shimadzu from selling Cuba infrared spectrophotometers used in food inspections, and blocked the German company Basf AG and its Latin American subsidiaries from selling Cuba herbicide-related products. Pérez Roque said at least 30 countries were affected by the extraterritorial enforcement of U.S. economic sanctions between May 2006 and May 2007.

Pérez Roque described the U.S. Treasury Department’s concerted campaign to disrupt Cuba’s relations with financial and banking institutions in third countries. That effort was accelerated, he said, after U.S. intelligence services gained access to confidential information from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, which handles nearly all payments and exchanges of messages among financial institutions.

Cuba, Pérez Roque said, “will not surrender. It fights and it will fight with the conviction that defending our rights today is tantamount to defending the right of all the peoples represented in this Assembly.”  
 
Anti-Cuba measures
On October 24 President George Bush announced new measures as part of Washington’s anti-Cuba campaign. He appealed to other governments to support a “Freedom Fund” to help finance groups in Cuba opposed to the revolution. He also offered to license “nongovernmental organizations” and religious groups to provide computers, Internet access, and scholarships to Cuban students.

Pérez Roque called the offer to license computers in Cuba laughable, pointing to the widespread and growing use of computers on the island. He said that today there are 600 Youth Computer Clubs “that give free access to the Internet to more than two million Cubans every year.”

As for the offer of scholarships, Pérez Roque said that Cuba has 65 universities with 730,000 Cuban students enrolled, in addition to 30,000 youth from 120 countries studying there on scholarships.

In response to the White House’s latest attacks, Cuba’s foreign minister listed 12 points that “the U.S. president should propose as aid” to the island, including: an immediate lifting of the U.S. embargo and travel ban, the release of five Cuban revolutionaries unjustly held in U.S. prisons, the extradition of U.S.-trained murderer Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela, and the closure of the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay.

Meanwhile, in October a U.S. court sentenced a South Florida businessman, Víctor Vázquez, to two years in prison for “conspiring in a scheme to violate Cuba travel restrictions” through licenses issued to nonexistent churches, the Miami Herald reported. The government said Vázquez was involved in a business through which thousands of Cuban Americans visited Cuba. Kekalani Vázquez, his former wife, received three years’ probation, and Yury Rodríguez, a travel agent allegedly connected to Vázquez, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison.

In the same case, real estate developer David Margolis was sentenced to two years’ probation for falsely telling the government he was traveling to Cuba for religious purposes.
 
 
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