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One of the strategies proposed was to deprive Cuba of its quota privilege in the US sugar market, based on the belief that "the sugar industry would promptly suffer an abrupt decline, causing widespread further unemployment. The large numbers of people thus forced out of work would begin to go hungry." At that same meeting, according to the now declassified secret memorandum, U.S. State Secretary Herter explicitly qualified these proposals as "measures of economic warfare."

This clearly genocidal intent was shamelessly asserted in an official memorandum signed by L.D. Mallory, a State Department senior official, on April 6, 1960. After admitting that "the majority of Cubans support Castro," and that "there is no effective political opposition," the author of the memorandum stated that "the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship." He went on to stress that "every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba," and proposed "a line of action which makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government." Roy Rubotton, State Department Assistant Secretary for Interamerican Affairs, wrote a laconic margin note on the memorandum: "Yes."

Three months later, on July 6, 1960, the United States adopted the measure first conceived a year earlier: the removal of the Cuban sugar quota. Never again would the United States buy a single pound of sugar from Cuba. A market that was established over the course of more than 100 years between the United States and Cuba, with Cuba guaranteeing the supply of this essential food product to the United States in the first half of the century during the two World Wars from which the United States emerged as the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world, was wiped out in a second, dealing a savage blow to the country's major source of employment and revenue and depriving it of essential funds for acquiring the food, medicine, fuel and raw materials needed to ensure the survival of our people.

Upon adopting this measure, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower declared that the United States would be looking towards other economic, diplomatic and strategic actions. This was merely a means of psychologically preparing international public opinion, given that the most strategic of all actions taken in that era had been approved much earlier and was already in full progress: the Bay of Pigs mercenary invasion.

From that time onward, successive economic measures against the Cuban people continued to accumulate shaping up a full and comprehensive blockade, which went as far as to prevent Cuba from importing even an aspirin produced in the United States, or exporting to that country a single flower cultivated in Cuba. At the same time, in violation of their constitutional rights U.S. citizens were prohibited from visiting Cuba under threats of severe prison sanctions.

This full-fledged blockade, shamelessly and euphemistically referred to in official terms with the apparently innocuous word "embargo", has been progressively intensified throughout the last 40 years.

A great many people have died or seen their health irreparably damaged because of the delays and complications involved in acquiring, through the established channels, medicines patented in the United States produced by U.S. companies in their territory or their subsidiaries abroad or by the national industries of other countries in the world.

It is impossible to imagine a worse crime, perpetrated in such a cruel, cold-blooded and merciless way for so many years. If food products for children, the elderly, pregnant women or sick people, developed with the most advanced technology, were produced either in the United States by their own companies or those of any other country in the world, or if they were produced in other countries by U.S. companies, these products were unavailable to children, the elderly, pregnant women or sick people in Cuba.

Actually, if even a tiny part manufactured in the United States was used in medical equipment produced anywhere in the world, with qualified labor and raw materials from other countries, that equipment could not be exported to Cuba.

This was the minutely detailed way in which the blockade against the Cuban people was designed.

But not even all of that, nor the "brain drain" or the theft of doctors -of which they took half of those in Cuba in the first years of the Revolution and of tens of thousands of professionals and technicians trained by a country capable of eradicating illiteracy in just one year- was enough to crush our people's resistance.

Then, at the most critical and difficult time in our history, when the USSR and the socialist bloc collapsed and the country was deprived of the fundamental markets and sources of supplies it could count on to withstand the ferocious economic warfare waged against an island located only 90 miles from the U.S. coasts, they decided to act more ruthlessly still against Cuba, therefore, the blockade was intensified to the maximum, in a case of truly vulgar and repugnant opportunism.

A number of U.S. transnationals involved in the marketing of food products, with subsidiaries abroad, had managed to overcome countless obstacles and continued to supply Cuba with certain foodstuffs, without violating any of the established rules, from distant third countries. The brutal policy intended to subdue the Cuban people through hunger and disease would soon include actions aimed at depriving the country of even these possibilities of acquiring food.

The 1992 Torricelli Act, among other restrictive measures that considerably affected the maritime transport of food and other commodities between Cuba and the rest of the World, prohibited U.S. subsidiaries based in third countries from trading with Cuba. The legislation put an end to commercial operations that, in terms of food and medicines, amounted to over 700 million US dollars worth of imports.

This genocidal policy reached even more infamous heights with the Helms-Burton Act, which codified all previous administrative restrictions, expanded and tightened the blockade, and established it in perpetuity. According to the Helms-Burton Act, the blockade would remain in force even in the hypothetical case that the Revolution was overthrown. This notorious juridical aberration suggests that, even if the succeeded in installing a puppet regime here, the blockade could only be lifted once the property issue had been settled as provided in that Act, or rather, once they had given back to the Batista supporters, embezzlers and former exploiters the lands received by individual farmers and workers involved in various forms of cooperative production and state enterprises, as well as all the formerly existing homes, factories, social facilities used for schools, hospitals and others or those built by the Revolution on lands once owned by Cuban and foreign landholders, or on urbanized land where over a million new homes have been constructed and handed over to the people by the Revolution, along with the definitive independence of their homeland.

Subsequent to the passage of the Helms-Burton Act, and with the aim of tightening even further the blockade against the Cuban people, numerous amendments introduced into bills that need to be passed with such urgent speed, and are at the same time so lengthy that many U.S. lawmakers do not even have time to read them, where adopted by show of hands in the U.S. Congress. The Cuban-American terrorist mob, closely linked to the extreme right wing, has achieved its goal of changing the blockade from an executive order into a rigorous and inflexible legislation. Thus, the genocide was institutionalized.

It would be impossible to accurately estimate the human and material damage caused by this genocidal policy.

The American Association for World Health (AAWH), following a 1997 study of the consequences of the blockade in this field, concluded that it "appears to violate the most basic international charters and conventions governing human rights, including the United Nations charter, the charter of the Organization of American States, and the articles of the Geneva Convention governing the treatment of civilians during wartime. [...] The Geneva Conventions, to which 165 countries are parties, including the United States, require the free passage of all medical supplies and foodstuffs intended for civilians in time of war. The United States and Cuba are not at war. In fact, their governments even maintain diplomatic representations in Havana and Washington. Nevertheless, the AAWH has determined that the embargo's restrictions signify the deliberate blockading of the Cuban population's access to food and medicine - in times of peace."

In the same report, the AAWH expresses its belief that "the US embargo of Cuba has dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of large numbers of ordinary Cuban citizens. [...]