Cuba Embargo Issue Goes to the U.N.

HAVANA, Cuba, Sept. 19, 2007 — -- Once again, the U.N. General Assembly will take up the legality of the 45-year-old U.S. embargo on Cuba when it convenes this fall.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque released a 56-page report on the embargo Tuesday, calling it devastating and an attempt to "beat our people into submission with hunger and disease."

A General Assembly resolution has passed by huge margins for the last 15 years. It demands an end to the U.S. sanctions, calling them a violation of international law.

However the United States has routinely ignored the resolutions because General Assembly decisions are not binding on U.N. members.

Perez Rogue, speaking at a Havana news conference, said the Bush administration had "furiously" increased enforcement of the sanctions, even though the General Assembly had voted 183-4 last year that the embargo was illegal and should be lifted.

The Cuban report to the United Nations on the embargo's impact over the last year lists dozens of incidents, ranging from unfair sanctions on third-country companies to the denial of visas to a children's theater troupe and to a handicapped sports group that wanted to attend an event in Argentina.

"The last year saw an unprecedented application of sanctions," Perez Rogue said. "We are at the moment when the blockade is at its most ferocious as part of the Bush administration's regime-change policy."

Since 81-year-old Cuban President Fidel Castro temporarily handed over power to his younger brother Raul Castro more than a year ago, the Bush administration has rejected any improvement of relations, announced tighter enforcement of sanctions and stepped up support for government opponents.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington earlier this week, said the transfer of power represented a "preservation of dictatorship."

"Unless the regime changes, our policy will not change," the highest-ranking Cuban-American in the Bush administration said.

Gutierrez said the embargo had worked by denying Cuba resources it would have used for anti-American activities.

Perez Rogue said he agreed in part with Gutierrez's assessment, except the resources would have gone to improving Cubans lives, not blasting the United States.