Blockade against Cuba is an attack on sovereignty says French academic
Prensa Latina (Spanish) | Tuesday, 15 June 2021 | Click here for original article
The French academic and essayist Salim Lamrani told Prensa Latina that the US economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba represents an attack on the sovereignty and self-determination of the Cuban people, and demanded it be lifted.
In an interview with the Cuban news website, the university professor said that the Washington policy contravenes the elementary principles of public international law and that he considered the siege imposed for more than six decades the main obstacle to the economic development of the island.
According to Lamrani, the position of the United States lacks legitimacy even in times of war, because although it impacts all sectors of Cuban society, it does so in a particular way in areas such as health and food, damaging in the first place the vulnerable population, that is, the elderly, children and the sick.
Nor is extraterritorial or retroactive legislation acceptable, such as the Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws, part of a set of sanctions against the Caribbean country that seek to change its political and socioeconomic system, which constitutes an attack on its sovereignty and self-determination, he insisted.
Regarding the tightening of the blockade with more than 240 measures by the Donald Trump administration, he regretted that Trump’s successor in the White House, Joe Biden, had done nothing as yet to remove them.
The only action of the current government has been to place Cuba on the list of countries that do not collaborate in the fight against terrorism, which is a scandal when one takes into account the fact that Cuba since 1959 has represented the main target of the terrorism in Latin America, mainly from the United States, Lamrani stressed.
The French intellectual urged President Biden to respect international law, the sovereign right of the Cuban people to choose their own destiny and the majority will of the international community and of US citizens themselves in favour of lifting sanctions.
Lamrani told Prensa Latina that at the centre of the dispute is the fact that the United States refuses to accept the reality of a sovereign and independent Cuba after more than six decades of the Revolution.
'It is a pathology from which the White House cannot be cured. All the rhetorical elements used by Washington to justify its hostility do not stand up to analysis. The reality is that the United States has not yet digested the triumph of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and hopes to be able to recover the island again and place it again in its area of influence, ' he suggested.
For Lamrani, an expert in Cuban-American relations, the world's leading power wants to make it clear that claiming the right to full independence has a price.
"José Martí warned us many years ago that that the cost of freedom is dear, and it is necessary to resign oneself to living without it or to decide to pay the price," he added.
