Firmness and Dignity in the Face of the Outrage
MINREX | Saturday, 1 February 2025 | Click here for original article
Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
On 31 January 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he communicated to the U.S. Congress the revocation of the suspension of the possibility of filing lawsuits in U.S. courts under Title III of the Helms-Burton Act.
Likewise, it approved the reinstatement of the List of Restricted Cuban Entities, with which entities or persons in the United States are prohibited from carrying out transactions, under penalty of being fined and having their assets frozen. It informed the decision to add the Cuban remittance processing company, Orbit S.A., to that list.
These are not unexpected actions. They are steps that were missing to undo the late, although positive, decisions announced by President Joseph Biden on January 14.
This announcement may also be the prelude to other measures that the team in charge of the Cuba issue in this government has had designed since 2017 to be able to further tighten, gratuitously and irresponsibly, the siege against Cuba in search of new and avoidable scenarios of deterioration and bilateral confrontation.
The objective of the measures is to intimidate foreign investors and prevent them from contributing to Cuba's economic development and the well-being of Cubans, through the express threat of being sued in U.S. courts. It is also to close all sources of external income to the Cuban economy as a whole; to criminally sabotage the ability of all economic actors, public and private, to provide goods and services; and to further deteriorate the living standards of the population affected by the blockade and the additional measures imposed during Trump's first term, to create social irritation and destabilization, and to try to achieve the often dreamed of and never achieved purpose of overthrowing the Revolution for purposes of domination and chastisement.
These actions are accompanied by communicational operations of disinformation and discredit and a powerful machinery of manipulation in digital platforms, with the purpose of making Cuba responsible for the impact of the criminal measures of the US government, so that the world and the people of Cuba do not recognize their executioners.
These are the same politicians who are driven by their commitment to reactionary families and special interest groups in the United States and Florida, who benefit from the blockade of Cuba by sacrificing the well-being and even threatening the livelihood of the Cuban people. These politicians of today, are the same architects of the dozens of additional measures to the blockade that were put into effect between 2017 and 2021.
Since the adoption of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996 and until 2019, all U.S. presidents, including Trump in the first two years of his previous term, consecutively made use of the executive power to suspend the application of Title III every six months, recognizing that it contravenes international law and the sovereignty of other States. Also, because it is understood that its application would generate insurmountable obstacles to any prospect of settlement of claims and compensation to Americans whose properties were legitimately nationalized at the Triumph of the Revolution.
As a result, about 45 lawsuits have been filed in the courts since 2019, primarily, against U.S. companies. These have had to spend money, time and energy to defend against what experts consider a legal aberration, with aspects that would qualify it as unconstitutional. Among the most significant aberrations, the title extends its reach to owners who were not U.S. citizens at the time of the nationalizations and whose alleged ownership has not been certified by anyone.
These are measures that have nothing to do with the national interest of the United States, or the desires of a large part of the business community in that country who wish to participate in the Cuban economy. On the contrary, it is linked to the outdated desires of the political heirs of the dictator Fulgencio Batista to reconquer Cuba.
It is a demonstration of the corrupt nature with which that government operates in general and, specifically, of its objective of economically asphyxiating Cuba, causing harm to our people, and pretending that we renounce the sovereign prerogatives whose conquest has cost so many years, efforts and lives.
With the reactivation of Title III, the application of the Helms-Burton Act is once again completed in its entirety, distinguished by its extreme extraterritorial scope, for violating the norms and principles of International Law, contravening the rules of trade and international economic relations and for being harmful to the sovereignty of other States, mainly because its provisions affect companies and persons established in their territory. It has been broadly, consistently and almost unanimously rejected by the international community in the United Nations, specialized international organizations and regional organizations. Several countries have national laws to deal with the extraterritorial effects of this law.
The Government of Cuba reiterates the postulates of the Law for the Reaffirmation of Cuban Dignity and Sovereignty (Law No. 80) and recalls the decision of the People's Provincial Court of Havana, on 2 November 1999, to declare the lawsuit against the Government of the United States for Human Damages admissible, sanctioning it to repair and compensate the Cuban people in the amount of 181,100 million dollars. Subsequently, on 5 May 2000, the Court determined the Economic Damages caused to Cuba and ruled to compensate Cuba for the amount of 121 billion dollars.
Cuba has reiterated its willingness to find a solution to the mutual claims and compensation. The Cuban nationalizations were carried out under the protection of the law, in strict compliance with the Constitution of our country and in accordance with international law. All nationalizations contemplated fair and adequate compensation processes, which the U.S. government refused to consider. Cuba reached and honored global compensation agreements with other nations that today invest in our country, such as Spain, Switzerland, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and France.
Likewise, the Cuban government denounces and holds the U.S. government responsible for the immediate consequences that the new measure will have throughout the country against the right of Cuban emigrants to send remittances and help their relatives, who are already suffering too much because of the siege intensified due to the unjust and fraudulent inclusion of Cuba on the list of alleged State sponsors of terrorism.
Cuba rejects these decisions energetically, firmly and categorically. It takes them as a new hostile and arrogant act, and repudiates the disrespectful and slanderous language of the State Department's communiqué, full of lies in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.
No one will be fooled by their false pretexts to try to justify these and future outrages. They will only succeed in reinforcing the isolation and universal rejection of the shameful abuse of the U.S. governments against Cuba and its people.
We call on the international community to stop, denounce and accompany our people in the face of the new and dangerous onslaught of aggression that has just begun.
They will do much damage with their murderous and cowardly plans and measures, but they will never achieve their main objective of bringing Cuba to its knees in order to subjugate it.
Cuba shall overcome!
Havana, 1 February 2025
