New York, 26 October 2022. 11,113,215 people lived in Cuba in 2021, according to official figures in the Demographic Yearbook, recently published by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI, by its Spanish initials).
Our island has an area of 109,884.01 km²; barely the size of the states of Tennessee or Virginia; and well below Alaska or California.
How does the U.S. government's blockade affect a small and developing nation?
Between August 2021 and February 2022 alone, this policy caused losses to Cuba of approximately 3.806 billion dollars.
This record amount, in just seven months, is a reflection of the intensified impact of the blockade on Cuban exports, the tourism sector, the merciless persecution of the country's banking and financial operations, the costs of geographic relocation of trade, the effects on production and services provided to the population and the obstacles to access advanced technologies.
It is estimated that GDP could have grown by 4.5 percent in these seven months, had the blockade not been in place, which projected to one year represents close to 8 percent.
Taking into account the damages reported between January and July 2021, only in the first 14 months of Joseph Biden's administration, the damages caused by the blockade amounted 6.364 billion dollars, which represents more than 454 million dollars a month and more than 15 million dollars a day.
At current prices, the accumulated damages during six decades of application of this policy amount to over 154 billion dollars. Taking into account the price of the dollar against the value of gold on the international market, the blockade has caused quantifiable damages of more than 1.391 trillion dollars.
It is not difficult to conclude that the blockade produces a very serious human damage that is impossible to quantify. It is aimed at harming the conscience of Cubans and frustrating their paradigm of development. It affects all Cubans, even those who live outside the island.
Several generations of Cubans have been born and have lived under the siege of this criminal policy, applied with viciousness and intentionality in order to harm the most sensitive economic and social sectors.
Permanent Mission of Cuba to the United Nations