By Elson Concepción Pérez on June 18, 2021
down with blockade, photo: Yaimi Ravelo
Five years ago today, Donald Trump dusted off the rhetoric of the Cold War and intensified the economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba compiling the unusual figure of 243 measures.
During the years of Trump’s presidency, it was very common in the United States to see the eccentric president being accompanied by two or three Cuban counterrevolutionaries anchored in Florida, as well as a similar number of politicians, those who have lined their pockets with dollars by living off the anti-Cuban policy. Marco Rubio and Mario Diaz-Balart flanked him, five years ago today, when the erratic President dusted off the Cold War rhetoric and tightened the economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba.
Trump from 2017 until the last day of his clinging stay in power, beat the miserable record of implementing 243 new economic measures against our island, the same ones that Biden promised to eliminate immediately, but has not done so.
It is impossible, because they deny it, to acquire medicines or health additives to save children’s lives, the remittances sent by Cubans to their relatives on the island were suppressed, and the arrival of cruise ships carrying tourists was completely cut off, among other actions expressly aimed at suffocating the Cuban people in a sadistic sort of cruelty.
Once out of the White House, Trump signed one of his last inhumane sanctions, the inclusion of Cuba to the list of countries sponsoring terrorism; this was the worst of the hoaxes as nothing could be further from the truth.
He banned tourism of his fellow citizens in Cuba, creating a List of Prohibited Accommodations, which included 422 hotels and rental houses. The persecution against ships carrying oil for the country and the so-called “black lists” they drew up against commercial, tourism and other entities are clear examples of the economic war against our population.
Biden could immediately with a stroke of the pen reverse the 243 sanctions, as well as other aspects of the blockade but he does not do so because he follows the same path initiated by that criminal memorandum of 1960, by Lester Mallory, of killing Cuba through hunger and discontent, of blaming the Cuban government for the ills that the imperial power generates This is the same path followed during 13 administrations, passing through the aggressiveness of every administration weather they are Republican and Democrats.
In recent weeks, Joe Biden has approved tenuous and timid modifications to some measures that, although in the right direction, are limited in scope. This Thursday, 26 Democratic congressmen urged him to ease sanctions against the island.
It is hard to calculate the damage the policy of economic siege has done to the Cuban people, nevertheless, it also exposes the empire’s impotence because Cuba is a small island that resists
But those who still say that the blockade does not exist are ignorant and blind.
Source: Cuba en Resumen