The Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez, denounced on Wednesday that the United States embargo against the island generates, beyond the economic cost, “extraordinary human damage” impossible to “quantify.”
“He blockade It generates extraordinary human damage. It is not possible to quantify or express in figures the damage, anguish, suffering and deprivation that the blockade generates in Cuban families, ”Rodríguez said at a press conference before international media.
The Cuban Chancellor first presented the Diplomatic Corps accredited in Havana and then to the local and foreign press the annual cost of the seizure between March 2024 and February 2025.
The document will attach to the annual resolution presented by Havana to the United Nations to request the end of US sanctions. Cuba has this resolution every year for more than three decades, which receives a majority support from the UN member countries.
According to the report, the estimate of damage in that period is 7556 million dollars (6393 million euros), which would mean an increase of 49 % with respect to the previous period.
“The blockade is real and has intensified to unprecedented levels.”
Transcription of the intervention of the chancellor @Brunorguezpin the presentation to the press of the National Report on Evidence of the Blocking A #Cuba (March 2024 – February 2025)https://t.co/9m9b0wzbat pic.twitter.com/zlhbxzdfp
– Foreign Ministry of Cuba (@cubaminrex) SEPTEMBER 17, 2025
The hard hand of the Trump administration
This is due, Rodríguez explained, to the hardening of the sanctions of recent months, with the new Republican Executive in Washington, with President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, Adalides of the hard hand with Cuba.
Since last January, the United States government has returned to Cuba to the list of sponsoring countries of terrorism – with important financial consequences – and has included a remittance company controlled by the military in its blacklist.
In addition, he has restricted the visas to several senior positions of the Cuban government-including its president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and several ministers-already officials of Havana or third countries involved with the Cuban medical missions.
The head of Cuban diplomacy argued that the true objective of these “genocidal” sanctions of the United States against Cuba is “to achieve a regime change” on the island.
Rodríguez said that these sanctions, which have been extended throughout the last seven decades, “will never achieve the goal of putting on the knees” to the Cuban people.
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Cuban embargo and economy
The Cuban Chancellor considered that the embargo, in force since 1962, “is dramatically evidenced in the deficiencies facing the population” and remarked that “it constitutes the main obstacle to the recovery of the Cuban economy, its growth and economic development.”
This statement is discussed by experts and economists, who also point to internal causes.
For more than five years Cuba has precipitated by a crisis that has contracted 11 % the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and decimated national purchasing power, in addition to generalizing electricity cuts and the shortage of basic products such as food, medicines and fuel.
The sanctions, together with the consequences of the pandemic and the design and implementation errors of internal monetary and economic policies, have evidenced structural problems of the Cuban economy, which has not achieved sustainability in recent decades.
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History of sanctions
The embargo formally entered into force on February 3, 1962, when the then President John F. Kennedy signed the 3447 Executive Order that decreed the seizure of trade with Cuba.
Havana considers that “it constitutes a massive, flagrant and systematic violation of the human rights of all Cubans and Cubans.”
The last twist of that policy was given by Trump in 2019, during his first term, and then, on his return to the White House, when he intensified the economic sanctions contained in the embargo, according to complaints of Cuba.
