Another Vote on Washington’s Anti-Cuba Policy at the United Nations
Weekend Edition November 22-24, 2013
The Politics of Isolation
Another Vote on Washington’s Anti-Cuba Policy at the United Nations
by IKE NAHEM
Annually, a near-ritual unfolds in the Fall Session of the United Nations General Assembly: the assembled states and governments dutifully, in near-unanimous consensus, vote in favor of a Resolution on the “Necessity of Ending the Economic, Commercial, and Financial Embargo by the United States of America Against Cuba.”
It was in 1991 that the revolutionary socialist Cuban government first attempted to bring such a Resolution before the United Nations as a whole. A furious US campaign of threats and blackmail, directed primarily against Latin American governments and other countries who were members of the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations, succeeded that year in getting them to pressure the Cuban UN delegation to withdraw it. (The Cuban delegation produced a communiqué which Washington had dispatched to regional capitals stating: “We urge you to instruct your ambassador in Havana and/or your UN permanent representative to approach the Cubans in an effort to have the resolution withdrawn. The Cubans should understand that their insistence that you support them threatens your good relations with the US and could damage their bilateral relations with your government.”) The next year the Resolution did get to the General Assembly floor with a vote of 59-3 in favor and 71 abstentions.
~ snip ~
Washington’s formal political isolation over its anti-Cuba policy can hardly be more complete. Is it possible to imagine any significant political issue in world politics uniting so many disparate entities often in significant conflict with each other — from the semi-feudal ultra-reactionary “Sunni” Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the “Shi’ite” Islamic Republic of Iran, from India to Pakistan and Syria to Turkey; “North” Korea and “South” Korea; Russia and Georgia, and so on across the spectrum from the most industrialized capitalist ex-colonial powers in Europe and Japan to their most “underdeveloped” ex-subjects in the so-called Third World?
And, it has to be underlined, that this vote was in defense of Cuba — a revolutionary socialist government ruling over a state where capitalist property relations have been overturned since the early 1960s and which has renounced nothing of its revolutionary legacy, heritage, and program even as it maneuvers and navigates in the reality of a disintegrating capitalist world order?
Cornered
Support for Washington in 2013 was technically the lowest ever, with only Israel in its now impossible-to-be-smaller corner. (Notably, Israel has significant two-way economic trade and commercial relations with Cuba and there is fully legal travel from each country to the other. “We assume that at least 10,000 Israelis have already visited Cuba,” said Daniel Faians, president and CEO of Polaris Group, a large travel wholesaler and airline agent based in Tel Aviv. That would be the equivalent, in an Israeli population of just under 8 million, of around 400,000 US visitors. Faians has found no anti-Semitism in Cuba and no personal hostility towards Israelis even though the Cuban government is a strong supporter of Palestinian self-determination and has normal or friendly diplomatic relations with all the Arab countries as well as Iran. Faians emphasized, “And we don’t have any problems with the authorities. If you arrive with an Israeli passport, you get the same treatment as anybody else.” Fifty-six Cuban Jewish athletes participated in the 2013 Maccabiah Games — the so-called Jewish Olympics — in Jerusalem with no incidents or problems. There has been significant Israeli-based capital investment in numerous Cuban projects and industries including irrigation technology, office towers, and agricultural production.)
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/22/another-vote-on-washingtons-anti-cuba-policy-at-the-united-nations/
