________________________________________




Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque
US Blockade: Blind, Deaf and Mute
Havana, Nov 1 (Prensa Latina) While the United States radicalizes its blockade on Cuba, opposition and resistance to this measure grow on the island and world criticism mounts.
Although the economic, trade and financial siege is a failed policy, Washington insists on making it persist beyond 47 years with new laws like the recent "Bush Plan."
Initiated a few months after the revolutionary victory on January 1, 1959, the siege has cost over $86 billion to Cuba, but it has not fulfilled its aim of reverting the country's social process.
Although the Caribbean nation has carried out its social-economic development in a rocky field, it has been successful in health, education and sports, and today is world renowned in these areas.
But it is undeniable that the blockade is generating shortages and important needs in the daily life, and recently Cubans are holding meetings of reflection to examine the real impact of the US siege.
A recent event organized by the UN Cuban Association, attended by representatives from 138 non-governmental organizations, termed President George W. Bush's government genocidal.
In the closing ceremony of this event, Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque made a detailed analysis on the group of punitive measures applied by the northern nation to asphyxiate the country's economy and condition a subsequent armed invasion.
All this popular debate is generated by the island's report entitled "Need to end the US-imposed economic, trade and financial blockade on Cuba,"
to be discussed by the 61st UN General Assembly on November 8, as it has over the last 14 years.
In the 2005 voting, 182 states spoke out that US authorities must unconditionally lift the blockade, in a clear example of the most generated international rejection.