Marce Cameron
On November 8, Cuba will once again present a resolution to the UN General Assembly calling for an end to the US economic blockade of the island nation. Last year, the assembly voted by 179 votes in favour, four against (the US, Israel, Marshall Islands and Palau) and one abstention (Micronesia) for a similar resolution.
In an August 15 report on its resolution, Cuba's socialist government notes that the blockade "is the longest-lasting and cruelest of its kind known to human history and is an essential element in the United States' hostile and aggressive policies regarding the Cuban people. Its aim is the destruction of the Cuban Revolution."
On January 1, 1959, the Cuban people overthrew the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. In May of that year the revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro passed the Agrarian Reform Law, which nationalised the big sugar plantations and other large landholdings owned by the US and Cuban capitalist elites, and gave impoverished peasant families ownership of the land they farmed.
Between August and October 1960, the revolutionary government mobilised Cuba's working people to carry out the expropriation of sugar mills, factories and other large enterprises owned by US corporations and Cuban capitalists. These nationalisations, legal under Cuba's 1940 constitution, formed the basis for Cuba's centrally planned economy, in which the country's wealth was placed in the hands of its working people.
The reaction of the US rulers to these nationalisations, and to the threat of Cuba's example of defiance, was predictable. Although a total ban on trade between Cuba and the United States was formally decreed by an executive order issued by then US President John Kennedy on February 3, 1962, hostile measures began just a few weeks after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.
On February 12, 1959, the US government refused to grant Cuba a modest credit request to maintain the stability of its national currency. Other acts of economic aggression included a ban on US-owned oil refineries processing Soviet crude oil and the end of US imports of Cuban sugar.
In a secret April 1960 memo (only made public in 1991), Lestor Mallory, a US State Department official, candidly explained how the blockade aimed to bring down the Cuban Revolution "through frustration and discouragement based on dissatisfaction and economic difficulties", and by "withhold[ing] funds and supplies to Cuba in order to cut real income thereby causing starvation, desperation and the overthrow of the [revolutionary] government".
While the decades-long US blockade has not been able to destroy Cuba's deeply popular socialist revolution, it has stunted Cuba's economic and social development and caused enormous suffering and deprivation. In its report to the UN, the Cuban government describes the US blockade as an act of economic warfare, and an act of genocide under the Geneva Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which the US is a signatory.
Under the blockade, all trade between Cuba and the US is prohibited, US tourists are not allowed to visit the island, the US dollar cannot be used in Cuba's transactions with other countries, and Cuba has no access to credit from financial institutions controlled by the US government or corporations.
The Cuban government has calculated that the direct economic damage to the Cuban people resulting from the blockade now stands at around US$82 billion, an average of $1.78 billion annually since 1962 (Cuba's GDP is estimated by the CIA to be about $34 billion).
This "preliminary, conservative" estimate of the damage done by the US blockade does not include "more than $54 billion of direct damage due to sabotage and terrorist acts encouraged, organised and financed in the United States", according to the report. It also does not include the indirect economic costs of the blockade, such as Cuba's restricted access to credit.
The blockade also seeks to prevent third countries from trading with Cuba. Following the restoration of pro-capitalist regimes in eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, socialist Cuba lost 85% of its foreign trading relations and the country was plunged into a profound economic crisis.
In 1992, the US Congress passed the Torricelli Act. This prohibited Cuba from purchasing food and medicine from the foreign subsidiaries of US corporations, which stood at $718 million in 1991. The Torricelli Act also banned ships from third countries from entering US ports within six months of docking at any Cuban port.
In 1996, the US Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, which further attempted to have third countries comply with the US blockade against Cuba. The Helms-Burton Act allows US courts to prosecute foreign investors who invest — via joint ventures with the Cuban government — in property owned by US corporations before it was nationalised by Cuba's revolutionary government in the 1960s.
Among other restrictions, subsidiaries of US companies based in third countries are forbidden from carrying out transactions with Cuban state-owned firms, or from purchasing goods made using Cuban products. Companies from third countries are not allowed to export any product to the US if it contains Cuban raw material. They are also forbidden from selling goods or services to Cuba which use US technology or which are made using Cuban products which exceed 10% of their value.
Cuba's report to the UN notes that 45% of the largest transnational corporations in the world are based in the US, and gives two examples of how investments from third countries in Cuba's world-class pharmaceuticals industry have been affected by the blockade.
"A large part of the technology, equipment, and inputs [for] the [Cuban] Centre for Molecular Immunology, which develops and manufactures diagnostic and therapeutic equipment such as anti-cancer vaccines, came from the Swedish company Pharmacia", the report notes.
When Pharmacia was bought by another company, Amersham, and then by the giant US General Electric corporation, GE "gave Amersham a week to close its office in Cuba and end all of its contacts with the island".
"Under the auspices of the World Fund for the Fight against AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis, run by the United Nations Development Program, US$50,400 worth of tinned meat for those living with AIDS was bought from the Brazilian company Oro Rojo. Later, this company informed Cuba that its factory had been bought by a US firm, and that one of the first instructions they had received was to cancel all business with Cuba", says the report.
[For more information on Cuba's campaign to end the US blockade visit <http://www.cubavsbloqueo.cu/en>.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 2, 2005.
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