For the 31st year in a row, on Nov. 2, the UN General Assembly approved the non-binding resolution presented by Cuba demanding that the U.S. lift the economic and trade blockade imposed on that country in 1960. Out of 193 members, 187 voted for the resolution, the U.S. and Israel voted against it and Ukraine abstained. Reflecting the anti-colonial mobilization of the nations of the Global South, against the backdrop of today’s global strategic crisis, this year’s vote was the largest in recent years. Entitled “The Necessity of Ending the Economic, Commercial and Financial Embargo Imposed by the United States of America against Cuba,” the resolution reaffirms “the sovereign equality of states, the non-intervention and non-interference in their internal affairs, and freedom of trade and navigation,” and urges all nations to refrain from the application of any laws which violate these concepts.
In motivating the resolution, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez appealed to the UN General Assembly to vote for “reason and justice,” the UN Charter and international law. The blockade, he said, “is an act of genocide…a deliberate act of economic warfare in times of peace, intended to destroy the government’s ability to meet the needs of its population, create a situation of ungovernability and destroy the constitutional order.”
He presented a devastating picture of the cruel effects of the blockade on every aspect of Cuban’s lives, accounting for energy blackouts, lack of medication and food and Cuba’s inability to trade with the U.S. due to draconian U.S. government requirements, etc. The blockade violates “the right to life, health, education and wellbeing of all Cubans,” he stated. In detail, he debunked the U.S.’s assertion that the blockade exempts medicines and medical equipment, documenting the lives lost, especially those of children, due to Cuba’s inability to obtain cancer and other life-saving drugs from the U.S.. During the Covid pandemic, the U.S. prevented the export of ventilators and medicinal oxygen to Cuba.
