CUBA: The World – Via the U.N. – Against the U.S. Embargo

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 4 2003 (IPS) - Cuban officials are regarding Tuesday’s overwhelming United Nations vote condemning the U.S. economic embargo against the island as a major political victory, and are applauding the international community’s "solidarity".

In a record-setting vote of 179 to 3, with two abstentions, the U.N. General Assembly approved the resolution urging Washington to end the four-decade-old embargo.

"That is almost unanimity. There is no other vote in the United Nations that has this kind of result," Cuba’s deputy foreign minister Fernando Remírez de Estenoz said on state-run television.

The resolution on "the need to put an end" to the U.S. embargo against Cuba won record support from among the delegates present at the U.N. on Tuesday, with only the United States, Israel and the Marshall Islands voting against. Micronesia and Morocco abstained.

In effect for more than 40 years, the embargo that Washington imposed against Cuba in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, has earned widespread rejection by the international community. Opposition has been growing since 1992, when Havana presented the related resolution before the U.N. for the first time.

Nevertheless, the balance of power has changed considerably over the past 12 years, even though the votes against the proposal to condemn the embargo never totalled more than four.

In 1992, the Cuban-sponsored resolution on ending the "blockade", as Cuban officials often refer to it, had 59 votes in favour, three against, and a whopping 71 abstentions.

Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, a dissident in Cuba, told IPS that the vote sends "a clear message about the opinion of the international community. The embargo is not something that belongs in these times. It is time to get rid of it.."

Gutiérrez Menoyo, leader of the exile organisation Cambio Cubano (Cuban Change), decided in August to vindicate his right to live in his native country. At the end of what was to be a visit to the island, he decided not to return to the United States, where he had lived since 1986.

The dissident said he opposes the embargo because it is unethical, although he said "the ills of Cuba are not due only" to the United States, but also to the Fidel Castro government’s domestic policies.

The European Union, despite the simmering diplomatic tensions with the Castro government, maintained its position of condemning the U.S. embargo.

Cuba-EU relations are at their lowest point ever, largely as a result of the Castro government’s round-up and imprisonment of 75 dissidents and execution of three ferryboat hijackers in April.

An EU representative explained that the 15-member bloc is opposed to isolating Cuba through economic sanctions, but maintains its critical view of the socialist-run island’s human rights situation.

Many of the U.N. members voting to condemn the embargo also object to the U.S. Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which calls for penalising companies from third-party countries that engage in business with Cuba. They see the "extra-territorial" legislation as a violation of their sovereignty.

In a celebratory mood, Cuba’s foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque said in a telephone conversation Tuesday with his deputy Remírez de Estenoz, "We have received expressions of solidarity with Cuba from the most unexpected representatives" to the U.N.

Remírez de Estenoz took the call while at the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana, where some 5,000 Cubans from across the country gathered to watch a live, giant-screen broadcast of the U.N. General Assembly debate and vote.

In a report on the embargo, sent in September to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Cuban government stated that its estimated losses resulting from the four-decade embargo surpass 72 billion dollars.

The U.N. vote comes just after Cuba signed trade agreements with nine of the 71 U.S.-based companies that since Sunday have been taking part in the Havana International Fair. The contracts are worth a combined sum of 30 million dollars.

In previous years, just one or two U.S. firms had presented their products at the Cuban fair.

The turnaround is seen as related to the constant growth in Cuban purchases of food on the U.S. market, since such transactions were given the green light by the George W. Bush administration in November 2001.

Despite Washington’s requirement that Cuba pay for all shipments in cash, the island has spent more than 500 million dollars on food, farm sector inputs and even cattle.

Marvin Lehrer, Latin America representative of the U.S. Rice Federation, in Havana for the fair, said it is time that more of his colleagues see the possibilities for investing and doing business with the island – and time to open the Cuban market and end the embargo.