Voting against Obama

On Tuesday, the U.N. General Assembly voted for the twentieth time in a row to condemn the U.S. blockade against Cuba. The vote in New York, the results of which were not yet available at the time we went to press, was expected to be overwhelmingly in favor of Havana’s resolution. Last year, 187 nations voted to lift the blockade with only two (the United States and Israel) voting against and three nations abstaining.

It was the third time during Obama’s term as president that the subject was brought before the United Nations. The hope that things would normalize under a new U.S. administration has long since been abandoned. While Obama had at first pulled back on the anti-Cuban rhetoric and reversed some of the stronger measures taken by the Bush administration, he nonetheless continues the economic war against the island nation to this day. In September, Obama extended anti-Cuban measures put in place under a law forbidding “trading with the enemy.” Cuba is the only nation against which this law, which was passed in 1917 during the First World War, is still enforced.

Cuba has repeatedly shown that the blockade adversely affects mainly Cuban children, but the United States, citing the old law, continues to forbid importation of medications by Cuban healthcare facilities. Cuban doctors are thus deprived of antibiotics and new anti-cancer drugs that are produced in the United States. Based on a United Nations report, Cuba calculates that the 1962 embargo has cost the country $104 billion and if adjusted for inflation, as much as $975 billion.

Cuba applied to have the U.N. restrictions lifted for the first time in 1992. At that time, 59 nations voted to lift the embargo, three voted against and there were 71 abstentions. That pattern changed constantly in ensuing years. European Union member nations began supporting the Cuban resolution after Washington’s 1996 blockade was extended under the Helms-Burton Act to nations that traded with Cuba.

In recent months, there has been an increase in cases in Germany in which local subsidiaries of U.S. businesses have had embargoes applied to them based on U.S. law. That resulted in Internet platform eBay banning the sale of Cuban products like the highly popular rum Havana Club. PayPal also refused to deal with online shops that offered Cuban products. A few German financial institutions, including the Postbank, forbid sending money to Cuba because its corresponding bank is headquartered in the United States.

In a Cuban media broadcast on Tuesday, former President Fidel Castro called not only for the breaking of the economic blockade, but also of the capitalist system, which he said promotes injustice in the world and endangers mankind.