The US economic, trading and financial blockade against Cuba is a basic ingredient of its policy of hostility towards the Cuban people. No people has been subjected on such a constant and permanent basis to a genocidal policy that seeks by means of hunger and disease to crush resistance to foreign domination.

The Cubans' firm resolve to undertake economic and social transformations for the common good was met by the ruling circles in the former neocolonial state by the launching of a veritable economic war of annihilation, which is currently at its highest stage.

The utter falsity of the widely divergent pretexts employed by successive US administrations for over 40 years in their attempts to justify the economic and political war on Cuba has been revealed in the United States' own declassified official documents, published in 1991. These include evidence and irrefutable proof that such hostility predated any measure adopted by the revolutionary government in or after 1959.

The representatives of the Batista dictatorship fled to the United States with
424 million dollars stolen from the Republic's treasury. These funds were deposited in US banks and have never been returned to the Cuban people, while just five weeks after the people's victory, a request to the United States for a modest loan to support the Cuban peso was turned down.

Cuba's revolutionary government adopted a series of measures aimed at recovering the nation's wealth and putting it at the service of the people. US reaction was prompt and aggressive: on 8th July 1959, Congress reacted to Cuba's Agricultural Reform Law by granting the US president enhanced powers to suspend foreign aid to any country that had confiscated US property.

A series of unilateral sanctions followed, aimed at wrecking the Cuban economy: elimination of the Cuban sugar quota (July 1960), banning of aid to Cuba and the imposition of a trade embargo (Section 620a of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act), as well as instructions to US firms not to refine the Soviet oil Cuba was compelled to purchase by the banning of sales of fuel to Cuba by US companies.

On 3rd February 1962, president Kennedy issued Proclamation No.3447, announcing a total embargo on trade with Cuba and instructed the Treasury Secretary to activate the banning of exports to our country. This act set the official seal on an blockade which, as we have seen, started long before then.

As early as 6th April 1960, a report by State Department official I D Mallory (declassified in 1991) revealed the purpose of the economic pressures then being applied, by commenting that the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support was through frustration and discouragement based on dissatisfaction and economic difficulties. He advocated the immediate use of all possible means of undermining Cuba's economic life, recommending as particularly effective the withholding funds and supplies to Cuba in order to cut real and monetary incomes, thereby causing starvation, desperation and the overthrow of the government.

US economic war on Cuba is totally without legal basis. According to Article II(c) of the Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (9th December 1948), it amounts to an act of genocide, as does the veritable and more flagrant, massive and systematic violation of the human rights of the entire Cuban people.

Down the years, the Cuban government has had to face new and constant measures designed to reinforce this aggressive policy towards Cuba which has had and continues to have serious effects on the material, physical, psychic and spiritual wellbeing of the Cuban people, while curbing its economic, cultural and social development. It has also compelled generations of Cubans to live in a permanent climate of hostility and tension.

Preliminary studies show that the damages arising from this genocidal policy already exceed 72 billion dollars. This conservative figure does not include the over 54 billion dollars attributable to damage to economic and social targets caused directly by acts of sabotage and terrorism incited, organized and funded from the United States.

The national health and education systems and food production and distribution have been the primary targets of American aggression.

The blockade has had serious effects on the Cuban national health service, hindering the acquisition of technology, raw materials, reagents, diagnosis tools, equipment and spares, as well as medicines, including those needed for treating chronic and distressing illnesses, including cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

The purchase of cytostatics, drugs essential to the survival of cancer victims, has been seriously complicated by the takeover by US transnationals of pharmaceutical laboratories in other countries which had agreements with Cuba.

Another example of the blockade’s effects is our inability to obtain the kits, manufactured by VITRO GEN, needed to detect the SARS virus.

The results of such bans have often been dramatic, not only in terms of the suffering of the patients and their families but also of the frustration of our doctors who are prevented from saving a life or relieving human suffering. (See Cuba's report to the UN Secretary General in response to Resolution 57/11 of the General Assembly, included in document Ref.A/58/287 of the UN General Assembly).

Despite these effects, the priority accorded to the health of its people by the Cuban government has resulted in achieving and maintaining a high level of medical services, entirely free of charge and available to all.

Another area traditionally affected by the restrictions arising from the blockade has been the food sector, notwithstanding the exceptional purchases that, overcoming enormous obstacles and restrictions, have been made by Cuba in the United States during recent years.

In fact, sales of food to Cuba are subjected to red tape and rules that greatly complicate matters. The US supplier has to cope with complex bureaucratic procedures in order to secure the necessary licence, while Cuba has to pay cash (no credit, not even from private sources) via banks in third countries and in other currencies, thereby incurring extra costs on the related banking operations. Cuban banks are also barred from participating in the transportation process.

In addition, Cuba cannot sell to any US business interested in our products. Sources of income that would facilitate expanding operations are thus precluded. In 2002 alone, merely being unable to export agricultural products to the United States caused losses totalling 114 million dollars.

The business in food has resulted from huge efforts on the part of the relevant firms in both countries in negotiating, contracting for and carrying out these operations; it owes nothing to the goodwill of the US administration. The President himself has been at pains to confirm that despite these sales, the blockade remains in place and is entirely unchanged, indeed the measures of economic coercion and sanctions are being intensified.

The economic war on Cuba has caused considerable losses also in the field of education. All Cubans have equal rights of access to free education at all levels of the system, including Special Teaching and university education, regardless of sex, colour, political or religious beliefs. The impact of the blockade has been felt amog others on school supplies in such sensitive areas as texbooks, pencils and exercise books, school uniforms, art-teaching materials and sports equipment. The effects have been overcome solely due to the inventiveness and perseverance of a body of highly qualified teachers deeply committed to their vocation, as well as massive efforts by the Cuban government and people over a period of four decades.

In the 1990s alone, the purchasing power of the budget for supplies to Cuba's schools fell by 25-30%, as a result of our having to source everything in distant markets and sometimes at higher prices, due to the restrictions imposed by the embargo.

The genocidal policy of blockade has sought, at all costs, to prevent access by Cuba to new technologies, scientific and technical advances, as well as loans and other means of funding for development from international financial organizations and institutions.

Not a single sector of the Cuban economy has escaped the destructive and destabilizing effects of this policy. In 2002 alone, the nation's losses on contracts involving higher prices than those obtainable under normal conditions totalled 403.5 million dollars.

The US blockade on Cuba aggravates its devastating effects on the Cuban people by its marked extraterritorial nature, institutionalized and systematized by the Torricelli and Helms-Burton Acts, which extended the policy's scope to the activities of subsidiaries of US concerns and to ships operating in third countries, as well as to a wide range of international trading, financial, technological and other activities in which the United States has a significant role as the world's leading economic power.

President Bush's Republican administration has introduced new measures to tighten the embargo, in the face of opposition from the international community and US public opinion. It has even threatened to use the presidential veto to block any measure Congress might approve to tone down this genocidal policy.

During 2003, the Government of the United States issued new regulations and toughened implementation of the existing rules, with the object of maximizing the restriction of bilateral exchanges in the academic, scientific, cultural and sporting spheres, thereby further damaging the historical relations between the Cuban and American peoples.

How did such a detailed, diabolical system come to be created over all these years, to stop an entire people from getting access to essential goods in the world's principal market, especially in view of the fact that some of these are unique and cannot be obtained elsewhere at any price?

How can such practices be justified, in terms not only of the universal rules on human rights and humanitarian international law, but even of the principles of trading and business deregulation promoted by the industrialized nations, including the United States, within the framework of the ongoing process of globalization?

The Government of the United States of America ignores the resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly every year since 1992 calling for an end to the embargo. That adopted in 2003 was approved by a record 179 votes.

Cubans cannot fully enjoy all their human rights while they are the targets of this monstrous and inhuman violation of their rights —namely, an economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed illegally for over 40 years by the Government of the United States of America.