By Randy Alonso Falcón on April 16, 2023
Marco Rubio
Like a schoolboy having his lollipop taken out of his mouth is the way US Senator Marco Rubio is walking around these days. The politician of the Republican extreme right and supporter of sanctions against Cuba is very worried because soon the empire will have no way to sanction anyone.
A few days ago, Rubio declared in his social networks and before the FOX network that the recent trade agreement between Brazil and China, two of the most important economies in the world, which establishes the use of the respective national currencies in the exchange between these two BRICS member nations, to the detriment of the dollar, was very worrying.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and the Brazilian bank BBM reached an agreement on March 30 to reduce the costs of commercial transactions with direct exchange between the real and the yuan.
Since 2009, China has been Brazil’s main trading partner and in 2022, according to Apex, the trade volume reached US$ 150.5 billion.
Recently, China signed similar national currency-based trade agreements with Saudi Arabia and Russia, hoping to increase the yuan’s share in world trade, currently estimated at 2.0%.
The agreement with Russia focuses on the yuan as the main currency for trade in various items. Both expect trade volume to exceed USD 200 billion by 2023, mainly using the Chinese yuan.
In the face of so many worrying signals for Washington, Marco Rubio declared with compunction to the FOX television network that in about five years there will be no more talk of US sanctions. “Because there will be so many countries that carry out transactions in currencies other than the dollar that we will not have the capacity to sanction them”, he acknowledged.
With the hegemony of the dollar established after the Bretton Woods agreements at the end of World War II, Washington not only became the world’s largest financier and the main economy, but has repeatedly used this power to sanction any government or country it does not like.
It became the new big stick of U.S. diplomacy, to try to control the world at will. Beyond the rhetoric justifying it in the name of “democracy” and “the violation of human rights”, sanctions are an instrument of war, designed to make peoples suffer in order to subdue sovereign states.
For this purpose, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is the watchdog; this agency is in charge of administering and enforcing economic sanctions imposed by the United States.
Countries sanctioned by OFAC are penalized under national emergency presidential powers, in addition to a specific authority granted by legislation which provides controls on transactions and freezes assets under U.S. jurisdiction.
The number of countries and companies sanctioned varies according to Washington’s whim. Suffice it to say that in his first term in office, President Bill Clinton imposed new sanctions 61 times against 35 countries, according to a report by The Heritage Foundation. The sanctioned countries were: Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Burundi, Canada, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Gambia, Guatemala, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Mexico, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, North Korea, Qatar, Rwanda, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Yugoslavia and Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo). These countries were home to 2.3 billion people at the time (42% of the world’s population) and were responsible for purchasing $790 billion worth of goods on the international market, equivalent to 19% of global export markets.
A 2021 OFAC list gives an idea of how the empire continues to impose sanctions as it pleases and to affect the lives of these peoples.
Cuba and Cubans know very well what these sanctions mean. Marco Rubio, with his conspiracy about the non-existent “sonic attacks” and his recommendations to Trump, has been one of the champions of the tightening of the blockade measures against our people; taken to the extreme with the absurd declaration as a country sponsoring terrorism.
Poor Marquito is worried. The Chinese, Russians, Brazilians and others want to take away his dollar-flavored chambelona, which is to take away his ability to screw half the world. And he who has always dreamed of being the Sanctioner in Chief.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US