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Sunday, November 19, 2006
The United Nations General Assembly has approved a resolution which calls for the United States to lift its trade embargo on Cuba. This is the fifteenth time that the UN body has approved a motion to stop the forty-four-year-long embargo imposed on the Cuban state. One-hundred-and-eighty-three countries voted in favor of the resolution, including all the nations in the Caribbean. Only the United States, Israel, Marshall Islands and Palau voted against ceasing the embargo which was imposed after Fidel Castro defeated the CIA-backed assault at the Bay of Pigs in 1961; whilst Micronesia was the only nation to abstain. In his address to the General Assembly, Cuba's Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said "the economic war unleashed by the U.S. against Cuba qualifies as an act of genocide and constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations."
Meanwhile in New York, in a ruling by a federal court Judge, more 90 million dollars in Cuban assets held in the United States will be allocated to the families of two men killed by Cuban agents in the failed CIA backed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. The families of Howard Anderson and Thomas Ray will get the money based on a 1996 US law that lets US citizens file domestic lawsuits against foreign countries in cases citing terrorism. It is believed that Howard Anderson carried CIA messages to anti-Castro groups in Havana during this period, but it is unclear whether he was a paid US Intelligence agent. This forms part of the United States agenda to cripple the Caribbean nation that has defied US imperialist policy for over 44 years.
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