14ymedio/EFE, Havana, 3 September 2022 — The president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, criticized the U.S. president, Joe Biden, on Saturday for renewing the Law of Trade with the Enemy, a statute of 1917 that underpins the economic embargo on the island.
“Biden didn’t dare to take away the ’pretext’ from us and signed for the continuity of the blockade,” the Cuban president wrote on Twitter, referring to the memorandum that extends that policy until September 14, 2023.
Díaz-Canel added that “the crime has lasted too long, but the Cuban Revolution will survive it.”
In the same vein, the Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, said that “Biden becomes the 12th president of the United States to ratify the framework that supports the policy of abuse against Cuba and its people.”
The policy, the Minister of Foreign Affairs added, “is rejected by almost all member countries of the international community.”
Then president John F. Kennedy resorted to the statute in 1962 to impose the economic embargo on Havana, and since then it has been renewed, year after year, by the following presidents.
Cuba is currently the only country in the world sanctioned under that law that authorizes the president of the United States to impose and maintain economic restrictions on states considered hostile.
The embargo has been widely criticized internationally and rejected since 1992 by a large majority of countries in the UN General Assembly.
Systematically called “the blockade” by the Cuban authorities, the embargo is the reason used by the regime to justify the shortage of food, medicines and other multiple problems, even though there is a law that allows Cuba to buy basic goods from the United States, as long as it pays in advance, in cash.
Most of the chicken that Cuba imports come from the United States; in the last 20 years, the United States has exported 2.78 million tons of chicken to Cuba — 39.5% of that in the last five years — for a cumulative value of 2,368 million dollars, according to data from the beginning of 2022. In addition, the Island also buys other products from the US, such as soy, fruits, coffee, ketchup, fresh vegetables and pet food.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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