UN casts record vote against US embargo on Cuba

UN casts record vote against US embargo on Cuba
By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Nearly every country in the U.N. General Assembly
told the United States on Tuesday to lift its four-decade old economic
embargo against Cuba in a record vote of 182 to 4 with 1 abstention.

The vote, held for the 14th consecutive year, was on a resolution calling
for Washington to lift the U.S. trade, financial and travel embargo,
particularly its provisions on penalising foreign firms.

Voting "no" were the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands.
Micronesia abstained and El Salvador, Iraq, Nicaragua and Morocco did not
vote. Last year the vote was 179 to 4, with several countries not voting at
all.

Cuba has been under a U.S. embargo since President Fidel Castro defeated a
CIA-backed assault at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Friends of the United States,
including the European Union also voted yes because of the penalties against
foreign firms but also criticised Cuba's human rights records.

And in South America and the Caribbean, support for ending the embargo was
strong, particularly from Mexico and Jamaica.

The measure is nonbinding and has had no impact on the United States, with
the Bush administration having tightened restrictions against Cuba,
including penalties against U.S. and foreign firms, visits from Cuban
Americans, licensed travel and remittances to families.

In Havana, where one of every seven Cubans have spent their lives under
sanctions, Ignacio, a tattooed youth waiting for a bus said, "It is a moral
victory, but nothing will change."

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque highlighted regulations tightening
the use by Americans of Cuban products abroad, presumably smoking a Cuban
cigar or drinking rum.

"In terms of insanity, this draconian prohibition should go into the annals
of the Guinness Book of Records," he said.

The United States for the first time downplayed the debate. Its envoy,
Ronald Godard, used a procedure allowing him to make a short speech from his
seat.

"If the people of Cuba are jobless, hungry or lack medical care, as Castro
admits, it is because of his economic mismanagement, not the embargo,"
Godard said.

He said Cuba's claims of being barred from importing food and medicine is
baseless because the United States since 1992 had licensed over $1.1 billion
(631 million pounds) in medical related goods and $5 billion in agricultural
commodities in the past five years.

Nevertheless, U.S. agricultural exporters have complained that tougher
payment procedures and letters of credit before shipments can leave U.S.
ports have harmed their business.

Perez Roque said the U.S. government in 2004, imposed fines on 316 citizens
for breaching provisions of the embargo and the number rose to 537 this
year, until October 12, 2005.

"Never before, as in the last 18 months, was the blockade enforced with so
much viciousness and brutality," he said.

In 2004, he said 77 companies, banks and private groups were fined for
breaking the embargo. Some 11 of them were foreign companies or subsidiaries
of U.S. firm in Mexico, Canada, Panama, Italy, Britain Uruguay and the
Bahamas.

The U.S. action that had the most repercussion in 2004 was a $100 million
fine the Federal Reserve imposed on the Swiss bank UBS for transferring new
dollar bills to Cuba.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said, "We are acting in
response to a regime that represses its people and stands in the way of
their progress and freedom. And I think we stand by our policy."

Godard said Cuba knew what to do. "Fidel Castro know what it will take to
end the embargo -- reforms that will benefit the Cuban people. He argued
that the trade embargo "is a bilateral issue and did not belong before the
assembly.

(Additional reporting by Anthony Boadle in Havana)
Reuters

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