Only Israel & US vote against UN call for ending embargo of Cuba

Yesterday the United Nations General Assembly debated the "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial, and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba."

The resolution was adopted by 186 votes for to two against (Israel and the US), with three abstentions (Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Palau). The 193-member Assembly reiterated its call to all States to refrain from promulgating and applying laws and measures not conforming with their obligations to reaffirm freedom of trade and navigation. It also urged them to repeal or invalidate such laws and requested the Secretary-General to report on the implementation of the resolution at the Assembly’s next session, which begins in September 2012.

Shamefully though, this was the 20th consecutive year that the UN has slammed this outrageous violation of human rights. And like so many things we have heard nineteen times before, our press is bored with this non story. The Obama administration - which should hang its head in utter shame for enforcing the failed fifty year old policy it inherited with such vigor - will simply move along as if nothing has happened.

Introducing the resolution, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, Foreign Minister of Cuba, stated that the US has never hidden the fact that the objective of the embargo which he said has caused more than $975 billion in damage to the Cuban people is to overthrow his country’s Government.

“What the US Government wants to see changed will not change”, he stated, declaring that “the Cuban Government will continue to be the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Our elections shall not be auction sales. There shall not be $4 billion electoral campaigns nor a parliament supported by 13 per cent of voters,” he added

The U.S. blockade contains the most comprehensive set of economic sanctions imposed on any nation in the world. Nothing has changed in Cuba as a result. None of this has caused an uprising or broke the back of the Cuban system. A generation after the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union fell, and the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Cuba posed no threat to U.S. security, the blockade grinds on like never before

The media may ignore this injustice but the trade union movement and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in the UK will continue to do all it can to end this barbarity. UNISON members will undoubtedly play their part and continue to show the solidarity they have shown with Cuba for the last 18 years.

50 years of Blockade END IT NOW

http://www.cuba-solidarity.org/appeal/index.asp