By Rosa Mirian Elizalde on September 26, 2024
The Malecon, Havana, photo: Bill Hackwell
Cuba is an island without a boat in sight. In Havana, from whatever height the bay can be seen, the sea is a neat blue line and days go by before a freighter crosses the horizon. It was not always like that. At the end of the 18th century and a good part of the 19th century, 40 percent of the traffic between America and Spain passed through Cuba, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo.
In the port of Havana, boxes of sugar and tobacco destined to be exported were piled up, and imported foodstuffs from North America transited in the opposite direction. New England, the West Indies, Africa and Europe were linked in a complex game of transatlantic mechanisms, which was engraved in the iconography of the time. In El siglo de las luces, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier described Havana as “the great emporium that all the ships of the world frequent”.
In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared a naval blockade during the so-called missile crisis. No ship entered or left Cuba for more than a month, and when nuclear tensions eased and the maritime siege was lifted, the blockade remained in place for 60 more years so that the ports never recovered their former vitality.
However, not even in the worst years of the Soviet implosion, in which Cuba lost more than 80 percent of its import capacity, had the territorial waters been so quiet. The Torricelli Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1992, prevents ships from third countries that touch Cuban ports from entering U.S. territory within 180 days, except those licensed by the Secretary of the Treasury. Any shipping company would think three times before challenging this measure.
Penalties for banks doing business with Cuba wreak havoc on their side. In a recent television program, the Minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment, Oscar Perez-Oliva, acknowledged that between March 2023 and February 2024, 155 commercial operations of the Cuban government were aborted, most of them to deliver basic foodstuffs to the island by sea.
Fearing reprisals for trading with a country that the U.S. government has included in its list of terrorist-sponsoring nations, half a hundred foreign banks refused to carry out transactions with Cuban entities (the minister listed 28 banks from Europe, 14 from Latin America and six from the rest of the world). Recontracting other companies caused delays of between 40 and 105 days in shipments to Cuba.
Two other Cuban ministers have painfully expressed the plight of those few ships that make it to port. The Minister of Foreign Trade, Betsy Rodriguez, admitted in early September that the rice of the basic food basket of the Cuban people was on the ships and until the government made the payments to the ship owners they would not be unloaded. Eventually the rice has begun arriving in drips to each house, but at the gates of October the same story is about to begin.
The same is true for fuel. The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O, explained the enormous “financial sacrifice” that it means for the government to unload diesel, gasoline, liquefied gas, fuel oil and turbo fuel, in a country that is sustained by the current account. When a little money enters the State’s coffers, the freight is paid and then the merchandise is unloaded in the midst of enormous financial tensions. The consequences are serious: blackouts of up to 10 hours a day in more than half of the country, garbage uncollected in the streets, paralyzed industries, public transport crisis, shortage of medicines…
Nine days before leaving the White House, the Trump administration designated Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, the last of the more than 240 measures implemented by that government against the island. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared at the time that “with this action, we will once again hold the government of Cuba accountable.”
Four years later, Pompeo and the strategists who put together this diabolical design are living their bureaucratic lives thousands of miles away from the suffering they have caused, while the Plaza of the Revolution is right there and the ships stop sailing to the island.
Rosa Miriam Elizalde is the First Vice President of UPEC. Cuban journalist and editor, PhD in Communication Sciences and professor at the University of Havana. She was the Founder and editor of the digital weekly La Jiribilla and the online newspaper Cubadebate.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English