UN again demands US end its embargo against Cuba
The United Nations General Assembly on November 9 overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution, for the eighth successive year, calling for an end to the 40-year-old US economic embargo against Cuba.
The vote on the Cuban resolution was 155-2 with eight abstentions, an even bigger majority than last year's record tally of 152-2 with 12 abstentions. On both occasions, only Israel voted with the United States.
Washington's friends and allies, including Japan, Canada, Norway, Australia and Finland on behalf of the 15-nation European Union, supported the resolution, mainly because they consider their own sovereignty is infringed by the "extra-territorial" effects of the embargo in punishing non-US companies that trade with Cuba.
The resolution refers particularly to the 1996 "Helms-Burton Act", which allows US citizens who were Cuban citizens before the 1959 revolution to file suit in US courts against foreign companies or individuals who "traffic" in confiscated property.
Opening the debate, the president of Cuba's National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón, said Cuba would file a lawsuit against the United States for more than $100 billion in compensation for the "enormous damages" caused by the embargo.
He did not say where the suit would be filed.
A Havana court has upheld a $181.1 billion compensation claim by Cuba against the US government for deaths and injuries it said were caused by four decades of hostilities, such as the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
Alarcón said it had been the US objective since 1959 "to destroy the Cuban people."
"It is genocide, purely and simply. For four decades that blockade has deliberately been sustained against the Republic of Cuba and all of its people, thus causing illnesses and deaths, pain and suffering to millions of Cubans, victims of a policy still in force."
The "guilty parties" should be punished in compliance with the 1948 convention against the crime of genocide, he said.
US deputy representative Peter Burleigh said the decision to maintain a trade embargo against Cuba was "strictly a matter of bilateral trade policy" and not a matter appropriate for consideration by the UN General Assembly. He had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.
The United States has consistently ignored the General Assembly's resolutions condemning the embargo against Cuba. Alarcón said he was "very satisfied" that intense lobbying by the State Department had no impact on the vote.