A more than half a century old United States economic embargo against Cuba came into the spotlight at the 77th session of the United States General Assembly when Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez launched a spirited salvo against the strictures imposed against his country in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York earlier this week.
In his address to the single largest gathering of world leaders the Cuban Foreign Minister described the strictures as “vast, cruel and immoral”.
Rodriguez railed against the measures that include “reinforcing pressure on banking institutions, companies and governments throughout the world” which he said were “interested in establishing relations with Cuba”. He added that in its quest to “bring about the economic collapse of the nation” (Cuba) Washington persists in “obsessive pursuit of “all sources of foreign exchange coming into the country”, a strategy which he said was designed “to bring about the economic collapse of the nation.
“The US offensive is aimed at bending states to their will by means of threats and economic coercion as well as military, political and diplomatic coercion in order to subject them to an order based on their whimsical rules.”
Back in July this year, the Cuban administration announced that the country’s gross domestic product had realized a year-on-year growth rate of 10.9 percent during the first quarter of 2022. The Cuban administration had earlier conceded that last year the country’s economy had declined by 12.7 per cent under the weight of a combination of the Coronavirus pandemic and the continued US economic blockade.
To help stimulate its fragile economy the Cuban government, this year, moved to put in place measures that included the granting of clearance to state-run companies to use part of their annual profits to finance the construction of housing for their workers. Additionally, the administration of President Miguel Diez-Canal had taken a number of additional measures designed to boost industrial and agricultural production, and substitute imports. These measures included the opening of a new foreign exchange market and the relaxation of non-commercial imports.
