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WORLD / America
US embargo has cost Cuba US$89 billion
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-09-19 11:16
HAVANA -- The United States' 45-year economic embargo on Cuba has cost
the Caribbean nation US$89 billion, 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 US-made components and from exporting to the US goods
with any Cuban raw materials whatsoever.
It also bars residents in the US from traveling to the island, and bars
Cuban businessmen from using US 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 US 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.
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