The new unilateral coercive measures approved by the US government, in addition to further reinforcing the strangulation of Cuba as a policy of punishment against an entire population, once again unmask the US Secretary of State and the rest of his anti-Cuban clan, who have not tired of repeating the lie that their genocidal policy of economic warfare is only directed against the Cuban government and its companies, and not against the private sector that they claim to support, or what they call "the average Cuban."
The freezing and confiscation of bank accounts belonging to entrepreneurs and owners of private MSMEs held in North American banks and their branches in other countries, besides being an act of blatant piracy, seeks in practice to paralyze all activity in this sector, which has an ever-increasing weight and impact on Cuba's economic and commercial management, especially after the implementation of important economic and social transformations that the country has been developing, and thus cause maximum suffering to its people.
For the Secretary of State and his group of haters, the hardships inflicted on more than 10 million Cubans by the total and criminal energy blockade are not enough. This blockade, along with other draconian measures, has prevented more than 98,500 scheduled surgeries (12,000 of them pediatric) from being performed due to a lack of resources and energy in operating rooms. Thirty-four thousand pregnant women have been unable to receive essential prenatal ultrasounds, and 67,000 children's immunization schedules are not up to date—both indicators in which Cuba has historically been at the forefront worldwide. The fuel shortage affects patients who need dialysis, and newborns requiring special care, where a machine without electricity can stop supplying oxygen, becoming a death sentence for a baby.
Also under pressure and threats from the United States, incompatible with free trade, several companies and shipping lines have withdrawn fromCuba. As a consequence of the persecution of our imports, more than 7,000 containers with essential cargo such as food, medicine, solar energy equipment, and other vital goods, are being held in Caribbean ports, and none of the companies operating in the region dare to defy the imperial prohibition.
What does the impact of this architecture of sanctions mean in the homes of every Cuban? It means food spoiling during prolonged blackouts. It means parents fanning a baby to help him sleep. It means a child doing homework by candlelight. It means containers of medicine that never arrive. It means water pumps that stop working, forcing millions of people living in apartment buildings to carry buckets of water upstairs. When we talk about collective punishment against a country, it doesn't just mean barrels of oil or containers being prevented from reaching Cuba. We need to consider the impact this has on those who daily walk the streets: a grandmother, a mother, a father, children at a school. These aren't numbers; they are human lives.
The Trump Administration, and especially its Secretary of State, like good students of Nazi Germany's ideologue Joseph Goebbels , tirelessly repeat the same lie: that the small island of Cuba is "a threat to the national security of the largest military superpower with the largest number of nuclear weapons, the United States," and that Cuba "is a failed state." In this way, they try to justify their genocidal policy against the Cuban people. They try, as the renowned American historian Howard Zinn said , to make "the abominable appear benign."