Cuba Slams Trump Administration over New Sanctions

Local Editor

Cuba on Friday said new sanctions planned by the United States were a futile attempt to change its policies and would only further isolate Washington internationally.

Earlier on Thursday, US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, announced that more than two dozen Cuban companies associated with the Communist-run island’s military or intelligence would be added to the more than 100 that Americans are already banned from doing business with or patronizing.

The announcement came just an hour after 189 member countries of the United Nations called in a resolution for an end to the US economic embargo on Cuba. Washington tried without success to amend the text to push Cuba to improve its human rights record.

The UN vote can carry political weight, but only the US Congress can lift the more than 50-year-old embargo, which Cuba calls a blockade. The United States and “Israel” voted against the resolution.

Bolton outlined the Trump administration’s plans to get tougher on Cuba and its allies Venezuela and Nicaragua in Miami, the heart of the three countries’ exile communities, just days before the midterm US congressional elections.

“We energetically reject these measures which will impact the economy and country’s development on top of the impact of the economic blockade,” the director of US affairs at the foreign ministry, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, said at a Havana press conference.

“They will fail. They will not break the will of Cubans,” he said.

Trump took a harder line on Cuba after former President Barack Obama sought to set aside decades of hostility between Washington and Havana. He rolled back parts of Obama’s 2014 detente by tightening rules on Americans traveling to the island and restricting US companies from doing business there.

Bolton also said the administration would review whether to allow US citizens whose property was seized by the Cuban government to sue foreign companies that have invested in the properties on the island, a longstanding demand of hard line exiles.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team