UN Unanimous Rejection of U.S. Economic Sanctions Against Cuba
cc. Guille Álvarez
On October 30, 2024, at the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, and for the 32nd consecutive year, 187 countries demanded the lifting of unilateral U.S. economic sanctions that have been suffocating the Cuban population since 1960. As usual, only Israel aligned itself with Washington, opposing the resolution put forward by Havana. Moldova, for its part, chose to abstain.
Imposed by President Eisenhower with the aim of overthrowing Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government, the sanctions have been maintained and reinforced by various U.S. governments. They have extraterritorial characteristics – the Torricelli Act of 1992, for example – which means they apply beyond national borders, affecting every country in the world. For instance, any foreign ship that docks in a Cuban port is banned from entering the United States for six months. The aim of this legislation is to prevent the development of Cuba’s international trade with the rest of the world.
Sanctions are also retroactive under the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which penalizes foreign companies investing in property in Cuba that belonged to U.S. citizens in the 1960s. This is a legal aberration, as a law cannot normally be applied to facts that predate its adoption. The aim of this legislation – which undermines Cuba’s sovereignty as well as that of countries wishing to maintain normal relations with Havana – is to deprive the island of foreign investment.
U.S. diplomatic rhetoric to justify the maintenance of a hostile policy towards Cuba has continued to evolve over time. In 1960, when Eisenhower imposed the first unilateral coercive measures, he justified his decision by referring to the nationalization of U.S. property. In 1962, when his successor, John F. Kennedy, enacted total sanctions against the island, he invoked the alliance with the Soviet Union. In the 1970s and 1980s, Washington explained that Havana’s support for revolutionary and independence movements around the world was an obstacle to policy change. Finally, since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has used the issue of democracy and human rights to prolong its economic war.
While a truce was observed during Barack Obama’s second term, the arrival of Donald Trump marked an upsurge in sanctions against the island. Over the course of his presidency, Trump imposed no fewer than 243 new coercive measures, including 50 during the Covid-19 pandemic – an average of one additional sanction per week for four years. Joe Biden, instead of returning to a more constructive approach, as in the 2014-2016 period when he was Vice President, chose to maintain the measures implemented by his predecessor.
More than 80% of the Cuban population was born under the sanctions imposed by Washington. These have cost the island a total of $164 billion, a sum that would cover the food basket for every Cuban family for 100 years! Under the Biden administration, economic sanctions have cost Cuba an average of $15 million a day, or almost $10,000 a minute. Each year, they represent a loss of more than $5 billion for the island.
Just days before the end of his term, Trump placed Cuba on the list of countries supporting terrorism. Since then, more than 1,000 international banks have refused to collaborate with the island, which is in crucial need of credit and foreign investment, for fear of reprisals.
According to the UN, “fundamental human rights, including the right to food, health, education, economic and social rights, the right to life, and development, are suffering the consequences” of the anachronistic, cruel and illegal state of siege imposed by Washington on 10 million Cubans. The widespread blackout that hit the island in October 2024 is a direct consequence of U.S. coercive measures, which contravene the fundamental principles of international law and the UN Charter.
Economic sanctions illustrate the United States’ inability to recognize Cuba’s independence and accept that the island has chosen a different political system and socio-economic model. There is only one way out of this asymmetrical conflict between Washington and Havana: a respectful dialogue based on sovereign equality, reciprocity, and non-interference in internal affairs.
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Salim Lamrani holds a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Studies from Sorbonne University, and is Professor of Latin American History at the Université de La Réunion, specializing in relations between Cuba and the United States.
Internationalism: Is It Dead or Dying?
It is difficult to think about Cuba without engaging emotionally. I couldn’t get back to sleep the other night, distressed over the tragic blackout of nearly the entire country with a hurricane approaching.
Yes, the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon evokes similar fits of emotion and sleeplessness; the actions of the Israeli government are obscenely bestial and criminal. Yet Cuba, because of its over six decades of defiance of US imperialism and its enormous sacrifices for other peoples, holds a special place for me.
No country with so little has done so much for others.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the example of the selfless support for the struggling Spanish Republic defined solidarity with others as well as internationalism. The Soviet Union sent weapons and advisors, defying the great-power blockade and confronting German Nazi and Italian Fascist support for the military insurrectionists. Tens of thousands of volunteers, largely organized by the Communist International, came to Spain clandestinely, overcoming closed borders, to defend the nascent Republic.
Millions rallied in support of the Republic– though it fell, in significant part because of the indifference and active hostility of the so-called democracies. How was it– many came to see for the first time– that democracies would not defend an emerging democracy?
For the last sixty years, tiny Cuba has been the beacon of solidarity and internationalism for later generations. Cuban internationalists have aided and fought alongside nearly every legitimate liberation movement, every movement for socialism in Asia, Africa, and South America. Cuban doctors and relief workers have rushed to disasters in uncountable countries. Wherever need arose, Cubans were the first to volunteer, including in the US (Hurricane Katrina), the country where the government has been most damaging to Cuba’s fate.
It was not so long ago that Cuba organized assistance to the Vietnamese freedom fighters.
Even more recently, we should remember, as well, those heroes sacrificing life and limb helping liberate the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Cubans heroically gave their lives fighting and defeating the racist military of Apartheid South Africa and the US’s surrogates, inflicting one of the most significant blows against US imperialism since the Vietnam war. The US ruling class has never forgotten this humiliating defeat.
Undoubtedly, Apartheid would have eventually fallen, but those tens of thousands of Cuban volunteers hastened that end by many, many years.
But Cubans were sacrificing for others’ freedom before that remarkable struggle and after. Paraphrasing the song about Joe Hill, wherever people were struggling, you would find Cuban internationalists — from Lumumba’s Congo to Allende’s Chile, from Bishop’s Grenada to Chavez’s Venezuela.
Some will remember that when Nelson Mandela was freed, he chose to first visit Cuba to thank the Cuban people for their contribution to African liberation.
Of course, Cuba alone lacked the material resources to confront the well-armed Apartheid military and their Western-armed African collaborators. Beside Cuba and behind Cuba was the material and military support of the Soviet Union. This legacy of Soviet internationalism, combined with the inspiring selflessness of Fidel’s Cuba, gave hope to many millions fighting to free themselves from the yoke of imperialism and capitalism.
Without a doubt, the overarching cause of Cuba’s ongoing pain is the United States and its closest allies. The great powers have never forgiven Cuba for mounting the first and only socialist revolution in the Americas, as they have never forgiven Haiti for showing that African slaves could rise and defeat a great power and free an enslaved people. The US blockade of Cuba has done irreparable harm to a people hoping to develop and follow an independent political course. Imperialism punishes a people that values its sovereignty with the same uncompromising integrity as it demonstrates with its passionate commitment to solidarity with others and its selfless internationalism.
Yet the Cuban people persevere. It does not go unnoticed by the plotters at the CIA and other nefarious agencies and the State Department that — even in its most weakened state, its most challenging moments — the Cuban people keep the torch lit that was passed on to them by Fidel. Despite the best efforts of the capitalist behemoth to the North, Cuban socialism endures.
In better times, the Soviet Union generously aided Cuba on its chosen development path. Lacking few industrially desirable resources and despite the stultifying effects of centuries of imperialist exploitation, Soviet aid enabled Cuba to integrate into the socialist community’s Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) on an equal, even privileged, footing. The capitalist media often compared CMEA aid to Cuba to the US’s robust aid to Israel. Ironically, Cuba used the aid to become a force for global social justice, while Israel has used the US subsidy to make mischief, to become a force for genocidal campaigns to create a “greater” Israel.
But Soviet aid is gone.
It is a source of sorrow, and not a little shame, that no country avowing the socialist road or benefitting from Cuba’s sacrifices has stepped up to even partially fill the void. Sure, countries thought to be “friends” of Cuba have made strong statements condemning the blockade, have made “fraternal” gestures, and have sent token shipments of basic foodstuffs, but not nearly enough to allow Cuba to step away from the dire economic disaster that has been multiplied a hundred-fold by the US blockade.
Lands where Cuban internationalist fighters are buried in the soil, lands with abundant energy resources, lands with modern economies that dwarf the former Soviet economy, fail to remember Cuba’s selfless sacrifices with pledges to help or to organize help at this particularly difficult moment. It may be presumptuous to expect the recipients of Cuban friendship and solidarity to make similar sacrifices for Cuba– that is what makes the legacy of Fidelismo so special in the annals of socialism. But surely, those countries could individually or collectively repair and guarantee Cuba’s basic infrastructure without great sacrifice– to give Cuba the minimal means to survive the punishment that imperialism has imposed.
It must be said that “socialism with national characteristics” seems to exclude the internationalism so central to socialism in the twentieth century.
In truth, what kind of socialism fails to sacrifice little to aid a struggling socialist country strangling from a capitalist blockade?
On a personal note, I remember well passing back through Checkpoint Charlie– the famous portal between German socialism and German capitalism. Tourists and others from the West, seeking to visit East Berlin had to return via the checkpoint. They learned on their return that they could neither exchange nor keep remaining GDR currency used while in the German Democratic Republic. Guards helpfully offered the often-unhappy returnees an option. They pointed to a large vessel brimming with cash with a sign in several languages: “Help rebuild Vietnam.”
I felt pride in knowing that I was a small part of a global movement determined to help rebuild what imperialism had torn down.
I see that pledge to internationalism again honored in the refusal of workers to load ammunition bound for Israel in the port of Piraeus, Greece.
I can only hope that the socialism of the twenty-first century will restore the internationalism that was a signature of the socialism of the twentieth century.
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