| The blockade has brought
the Cuban people untold sorrows. Highly vulnerable sectors upon which any country’s
wellbeing depends, such as food, health, education, transportation and housing,
have been some of the main targets of this genocidal policy.
FOOD
In its obvious attempt to bring the Cuban people to its knees
through starvation, from July 2004 to April 2005 the blockade has cost the food
industry approximately $ 55,863,957, money with which nearly one third of this
sector could be technologically upgraded.
In 2004 alone, the blockade directly cost Cuba’s poultry
industry more than $ 16,100,000, undermining a source of proteins for Cubans
and crippling this industry’s productive growth: with the $ 30,000,000
it lost, 750,000,000 eggs could have been produced.
As Cuba does not have access to state-of-the-art technologies
for the production of poultry meats, chiefly manufactured in the United States,
production in this sector remained paralyzed during the year and over 4,000
industry workers had to be reassigned to other sectors, making the industry
lose $ 5,000,000 in added value with respect to meat production, the equivalent
of 8,800 tons of poultry meat.
The Assorted Crops Company attached to the Ministry of Agriculture
estimated that, in the import of potato and vegetable seeds from third countries,
extra freightage costs exceeded the sum of $ 1,000,000, 50 % of the cost of
vegetable seeds imported every year.
Unable to place its Havana Club rum on the US market and forced
to commercialize it in third countries under far less favourable conditions
(because of these countries’ remoteness and the nature of their markets),
Cuba Ron S.A. reported losses of $ 28,400,000.
HEALTH
During the period covered by this report, the blockade caused
damages estimated at $ 75,700,000 in the health sector. This figure says nothing
of the incalculable suffering endured by the Cuban people because of a lack
of medications, equipment and other materials in all facilities which comprise
the national health network.
As was described elsewhere[1]
, so-called high-tech branches in this sector, such as transplants, cardiovascular
surgery, nephrology and genetic engineering, continue to be affected by unreliable
supply channels. Many of materials used in these branches of medicine are produced
in the United States and, on a number of occasions, US authorities have refused
to grant Cuba permission to purchase them or have simply protracted the process
of acquiring them ad infinitum.
This has had a direct impact on the programme for children in
need of hepatic transplants. An example is the failure of Abbott Laboratories
to reply to Cuba’s request to purchase a piece of equipment used to measure
doses of the immune suppressor Tracolimus (FK506), produced exclusively by this
US lab, needed to measure contents of this suppressor in the blood, whose variations
may bring complications such as infections and secondary tumours.
$ 18,000,000,000 dollars in cholesterol-reducing medication
were sold in the United States in 2004 alone. If the Cuban-made polycosanol
had been put on the US market —and witnessed a mere 1 % of sales in the
market— the Cuban people could have seen an income of $ 180,000,000 in
2004.
The following are some examples which reveal how the blockade
has affected this sector:
- No access to dialysis technologies and accessories (artificial
kidneys and their component parts) sold in the US market, the closest, most
technologically developed and competitive market. This affects the country’s
nephrology services, through which 1,839 patients, 30 of them children, receive
haemodialysis treatment.
- The purchase of diagnostic kits for the medical entomology
lab in distant markets, such as the Asian market. The country would have saved
30 % in spending —$ 52,116—had it been able to purchase these kits
from the United States.
- Impact on the monitoring of and fight against epidemics. The
country pays 30 % more what it would if it imported the needed products and
equipment directly from the United States, saving on transportation and intermediary
costs.
- $ 1,518,905 in insecticides were spent in 2004. Had these been purchased in
the United States, transportation costs would have been reduced by 20 % (savings
of $ 303, 781).
- The cardiology programme has been affected as Cuba cannot
acquire consumable materials used in surgical procedures directly from the manufacturers.
Thus, Cuba has had to pay an extra $ 66,275 in the course of the year.
- The US company GIBCO produces Amniomax, a product used to
detect congenital malformations in pregnant women over 38, the only product
in existence around the world used to conduct these tests. Every year, 6,160
100 ml vials are imported for the National Centre for Medical Genetics through
an intermediary. Could Cuba purchase it directly from the United States, it
would save $ 136,700.
The losses in this sector (which guarantees that all Cubans
have free access to health care) described above —a total of $ 506,756—could
have been used to finance:
• The purchase of XP – Maxamaid (powder) and XP
– Maxamum (powder), products used in the special diets of children with
phenylketonuria (whose yearly consumption would cost $ 275,360).
• The average yearly costs of Traculimus 0.5 mg, 1 mg
and 5 mg, an immune suppressor administered to patients that have had organ
transplants, calculated at $ 66,000.
• The purchase of materials for a triple vaccination campaign (rubella,
parotitis, measles), at around $ 156,212.
EDUCATION
The educational
sector continues to experience the problems described in the last two reports
submitted to the Secretary General[2] , particularly
with respect to supplies of pencils, notebooks, paper and other didactic materials
and means, today only at 60 % of what the country received in 1989. The annual
deficit in materials is calculated at $ 3,990,000.
Obstacles continue
to limit the number of textbooks and supplementary bibliographies printed (of
a value estimated at $ 3,860,000).
Shortages in essential
products continue to affect middle and higher level learning institutions and
kindergartens; these include articles of hygiene, clothing for children, school
uniforms and shoes and, in the case of kindergartens, indispensable electrical
appliances such as washing machines and irons.
The difficulties
that services for children with special educational needs face as a result of
the blockade have continued to worsen. Cuba continues to have difficulties obtaining
and/or repairing Braille systems for blind and visually impaired children (these
are bought at such high prices as $1,000 per unit, when they could be bought
at $ 700 in the US market), Braille paper, equipment for special schools for
strabismic and amblyopic children, shortages of which make it difficult for
Cuba to maintain and further expand its principle of “Education for Everyone
at all of Life’s Stages”.
With $ 3,059,600,
all of the material shortages that today affect schools for children with special
educational needs could have been done away with.
Nearly 80 % of
refrigeration units used to store food products in the 786 middle-level educational
centres in the country are inactive or in a very poor condition. A total of
$ 9,420,000 —$ 1,884,000 spent every year over a period of five years—are
needed to completely repair these units, something Cuba has not been able to
undertake because of the limitations imposed by the blockade. These limitations
also have an impact on the construction, maintenance and repair of educational
centres and institutions and on the availability of school facilities, especially
felt in kindergartens.
According to calculations
with respect to how the Cuban economy has been affected by this genocidal policy
and in consideration of the percentage of Cuba’s GDP devoted to the educational
sector, had the blockade been lifted, $ 166,000,000 would have become available
to the sector, enough funds to eradicate the main shortages facing education,
estimated at $ 60,000,000.
SPORTS
The sphere of sports
has been significantly affected by the US government’s blockade.
The blockade has
had a very negative impact on the availability of material resources needed
to advance the numerous physical education and school sports improvement programmes
in existence.
The limitations
and obstacles which the blockade has imposed upon and thrown in the way of our
efforts to obtain balls, chronometers, appropriate sporting footwear and the
required technical and auxiliary pedagogical equipment have had a far from insignificant
impact on our ability to establish all of the material conditions needed to
take physical education to the highest possible levels at all levels of education,
an objective which Cuban society and authorities consider a priority.
Blockade restrictions
on the purchase, in the United States, of raw materials used in the production
of sports instruments, including types of rubber and chemical products which
Cuba is unable to produce, have forced Cuba to purchase these products in European
and Asian countries and to pay an extra $ 72,000 in freightage alone.
To get a picture
of how the blockade has affected Cuban sports, suffice it to mention the concrete
effects that this criminal policy has had on baseball, Cuba’s national
sport. The country uses approximately 30,000 balls for its professional games
and another 30,000 for school and amateur games. Currently, the production of
balls costs the Cuban sports industry $ 0.95 a unit, as all raw materials are
imported from the Asian market: two types of worsted, thread, glue, leather,
ink and the rubber or cork core.
Had Cuba access
to the US market, it could employ state-of-the-art technology and high quality
raw materials and avail itself of much lower freightage costs to reduce production
costs by 50 %, that is to say, to about $ 0.45 / unit.
Cuba’s sports
industry has been especially affected by the limited possibilities it has to
upgrade its technology; were restrictions lifted in this connection, Cuba would
today have most of the resources needed to make sports accessible to everyone
and offer high-performance athletes the facilities they require.
The domestic production
of baseball and soccer shoes, boxing items such as gloves and head protectors
(which met the standards of the International Boxing Association), punching
bags and other instruments used to train athletes for combat sports, had to
be discontinued because the needed raw materials could not be obtained.
Sports instruments
and accessories like those mentioned above and many others, such as javelins,
poles, hurdles, specialized footwear and trampolines —which could be produced
in Cuba or purchased in the United States at much lower prices—are currently
purchased in third countries, with a resulting increase in costs of more than
50 %.
The planning and
execution of the training programme for high-performance athletes has also suffered
as a result of the blockade, which bars Cubans from participating in sporting
events, conventions, training courses and international fora held in the United
States, which does not issue visas or ignores the invitations made to Cuban
athletes or sports institutions, a consequence of the veritable labyrinth of
obstacles produced by this policy.
The number of bilateral
encounters and exchanges with important US boxing, baseball, volleyball, wrestling,
gymnastic and basketball teams has been significantly reduced, obliging Cuba
to arrange trips to Europe and other, more remote countries, in order to hold
practice games to train national athletes, something which has increased the
costs associated with the high-performance programme substantially.
Access to the market
and the purchase of state-of-the-art technologies that would be useful in the
training of Cuban athletes have been restricted, resulting in higher levels
of spending in this area.
TRANSPORTATION
In this period,
the blockade has cost Cuba $ 182,048,000 in the area of transportation.
To illustrate how
this sector has been affected, suffice it to point out that the vehicles and
motors used in Havana’s Metrobus service, chiefly of US make, had to be
purchased through an intermediary. With the $ 795,642 which were paid in excess
to purchase 98 vehicles in the period under analysis, another 62 vehicles could
have been purchased; coupled with the $ 567,978 paid extra because the needed
spare pieces could not be directly purchased from the United States, this could
have allowed Cuba to increase its public transportation services by 30 %.
The blockade has
cost Cuban railway services $ 22,487,560. Considering the fact that nearly 1,200,000
US tourists could have visited us in this period and that 12 % of these would
have travelled via FERROCUBA from the capital to various destinations around
the country, Cuba’s railway company would have taken in around $ 3,409,600,
money it could have used to repair some 10 locomotives that offer national and
coach services.
With respect to
problems affecting the national railway network, since 50 % of trains use locomotives
that were manufactured in the United States and have over 30 years of operation,
employing obsolete technology and needing spare pieces that are difficult to
obtain, and since the high risks of operating these locomotives involve additional
spending, Cuba has lost 433,736 customers and has been unable to transport 587,194
tons of load during this period, the equivalent of $ 19,077,960.
With the $ 182,048,000
mentioned above as the total lost in this sector during the year, some of the
following needs could have been met:
- Replace and obtain
new buses for Havana’s public transportation system, incorporating 679
regular and 600 articulated buses (the latter to completely replace metrobuses).
This would cost a total of $ 181,100,000.
- Construct the still unfinished stretches of the Havana – Santiago de
Cuba highway, including intersections with other roads ($ 160,200,000); in Havana,
replace traffic lights, pave and signpost roads, among other things ($ 25,000,000,
approximately).
[1]Report
of the Secretary General of the United Nations, 2004 (A/59/302)
[2]Reports of the Secretary General
of the United Nations, 2003 and 2004 (A/58/287 and A/59/302).
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