Excluding Cuba from the review process of unilateral coercive measures applied during the Covid-19 pandemic was an opportunistic decision and cold cruelty, warned Johana Tablada, deputy director general for the United States at the Foreign Ministry.
In a publication in her social networks, Tablada recalled that as a result of the devastating effect of those restrictive measures of the United States on public health and the population of those unilaterally "sanctioned" countries that were also affected by Covid-19, the calls to Washington multiplied.
International bodies, governments and organizations asked the Democrat "to put an end to or temporarily suspend some part of these misnamed sanctions", he wrote in a post on his Facebook page.
As a result of this request - he said - Biden issued a national security presidential directive ordering his government team to review the impact of these coercive measures of the United States in the fight of many countries against Covid-19.
The President, he added, asked to examine which of those measures that limited the capacity of the States to confront the pandemic could be eliminated, suspended or temporarily alleviated.
Tablada stressed that among the toughest provisions of the United States against Cuba and its population in 2021 was "precisely the decision to exclude only our country from that review process of the unilateral measures that affected the capacity of the states to face Covid-19".
He commented in the text that thanks to the aforementioned order or presidential directive from Biden, nations such as Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, among others, "saw some relief in the so-called sanctions".
He pointed out that it was a very necessary measure "even if insufficient to be able to acquire products related to health and specifically to the fight against the pandemic".
Cuba was left out by the reviewers of the issue or the executors, the official warned.
"Perhaps we will never know who gave the order to deliberately exclude from this exercise Cuba and only Cuba, one of the most supportive countries in the world in terms of health even in times of pandemic and the one that suffers the most comprehensive and prolonged system of unilateral coercive measures in the world," she said.
That measure, together with the fraudulent inclusion of Cuba on the terrorist list and the continuity of the policy of maximum pressure applied during his term in office by Donald Trump (2017-2021) and Biden, "cost lives to the people of Cuba," he emphasized.
In the United States congressmen and sectors of civil society also called for suspending the blockade or eliminating some of the aspects that prevented and hindered us from acquiring equipment, goods and inputs necessary for the manufacture of medicines and our vaccines, he argued.
Excluding Cuba "was an opportunistic decision of cold cruelty that tried to use Covid-19 as an ally, putting before the humanitarian need (...) the political interests of destabilization, domination and electoral commitments with corrupt sectors that sustain an immoral policy", concluded Tablada.