[News] The US Gets Isolated by Its Blockade Policy: What Will Happen Now?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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The
US Gets Isolated by Its Blockade Policy: What Will Happen Now?By Alejandra
Garcia on June 24, 2021 from Havana

Cuba bursting with pride, as 184 nations stand with them in the UN. photo:
Bill Hackwell

Cuba’s new victory over Washington was not news in the US. No head of
diplomacy or White House representatives issued any criteria regarding the
fact that 184 of the 193 countries that make up the United Nations (UN)
voted on Wednesday to end the blockade imposed on the island for almost 60
years.

Only two governments voted in favor of maintaining the blockade; The United
States and Israel. Although President Joe Biden’s administration has
repeated that it is “evaluating” that policy, yesterday there was no sign
of the turnaround he promised during his election campaign. The world
expected Washington to resume some advances of the Obama-era when Biden was
vice president. Ironically when the same vote came up in the UN in 2016 the
Obama – Biden Administration abstained from voting against it but now the
reality is that Biden not only regressed at the UN but he is also keeping
intact the deadly 242 sanctions against Cuba that was dished out during
Trump.

Analysts say Miami continues to define the new administration’s political
calculus regarding its relations with Cuba. “Dante’s first ring of hell is
reserved for Florida’s Cuban-Americans who continue to encourage the
blockade and hostilities toward the island. How can anyone ask for their
families’ suffering?” U.S.-based Cuban attorney Jose Pertierra said during
an interview for Cubavision Internacional.

Biden’s representative at the United Nations, Rodney Hunter, sought to
justify the administration’s vote by claiming that its policy is “for the
good of the Cuban people.” He told yet another string of lies, such as that
“sanctions are a series of tools to promote democracy and respect for human
rights in Cuba.”

Ignoring the massive backlash that erupted at the General Assembly session
against the White House, Hunter added that “the U.S. is a trading partner
of the island, despite the blockade. We are in direct contact with members
of its civil society and continue to encourage the Cuban people to
determine their own futures.”

Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez refuted Hunter’s every word
with precise data. “The blockade is an economic war with extraterritorial
measures, a mechanism of political interference that seeks to generate
political and social instability on the island. Just like COVID-19, the
blockade suffocates and kills,” he affirmed.

For Cuban journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde, this policy is for Cuba what it
was like for George Floyd’s neck with the knee of that white policeman who
suffocated him to death in May 2020.

“Cuba was shaken by the image of George Floyd suffocating on the ground
while the policeman would not lift his knee from his neck, despite the
victim’s cries that he could not breathe. We know that feeling of
helplessness of many Americans before their government’s systematic abuse
of power,” she wrote in La Jornada.

Cuba knows the knee is always there, invisible, on someone’s neck. “It
happens the same way with the blockade, that word that may seem like an
abstraction, but it is not for those who are in an intensive care unit
(UCI) in Cuba, have an ill child, or have spent six hours in a line to buy
food,” Elizalde added.

Today, Biden is following the same path of Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, when
he banned Cuba’s sugar exports to the US, which were 95 percent of the
island’s sales abroad, to starve the Cuban people. Meanwhile, the U.S.
press looks the other way and fills headlines about the latest scandal of
some unfortunate celebrity, as happened yesterday, for example.

After the vote at the UN, the news that was among the top stories of the
day and that received all the alerts was Britney Spears’ complaint that she
is not allowed to live as she wishes. People in the US were up to speed on
all the details of her day in court but had to dig deep to find even a
morsel of news about the humiliation of US policy in the UN by 184 nations
of the world standing with Cuba.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English
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