Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel on Sunday denounced Washington’s “genocidal policy” towards Cuba, accusing the United States of wanting to “appropriate the country.”
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Since January, Donald Trump’s government has applied a policy of maximum pressure on the communist island, located 150 km from the coast of Florida. In addition to the embargo in force since 1962, there was an oil blockade and a long list of sanctions against Cuban companies and leaders.
These measures led to a drastic drop in tourism, the departure of many foreign companies and a drying up of foreign currency inflows. The most recent sanctions, announced Thursday, concern the Cuban medical missions abroad program, one of the country’s main sources of revenue.
AFP
“Cuba is waging a historic battle today” against “a genocidal policy which has set itself the objective of asphyxiating an entire people in order to take over the country,” denounced the Cuban head of state from the province of Pinar del Río (west).
Miguel Diaz-Canel participated in the celebration of the 73rd anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks carried out in 1953 by Fidel Castro (1926-2016) in the east of the island, considered the beginning of the revolutionary struggle.
“The blockade is a weapon of war and causes deaths,” accused the head of state, believing that Washington was seeking to provoke, in Cuba as in other countries, a “social explosion with the sole aim of imposing governments aligned with its imperial interests”.
On the island of 9.4 million inhabitants, the energy crisis is causing power cuts of 30 hours in the capital and several days in a row in the provinces. It weakens social services and fuels social unrest. The country also experienced three general power outages in July.
AFP
Demonstrations take place regularly in the capital, particularly in the evening. Residents are banging pots and lighting piles of garbage on fire to express their discontent with continued power cuts, water cuts and food shortages.
The Cuban president called for “unity” and the “implementation of economic and social transformations”, announced in mid-June in the form of a program of 176 measures which provides for a major economic shift towards a market economy.
President Donald Trump says Cuba poses “an extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. He has threatened several times to “take control”.
