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Cuban Official Slams US Blockade

By Jorge Petinaud, Prensa Latina,

Moscow : The US blockade has caused irrational damage to Cuba and must be stopped, the island’s Transport Minister Jorge Luis Sierra stated Wednesday in this capital.

Interviewed by Prensa Latina, Sierra talked of difficulties of that policy Washington has maintained for almost 50 years.

“We purchase goods in Iran, a nation included in the so-called axis of evil, like Cuba, according to the US government,” the minister said.

“Finding a vessel to transport those goods from Teheran to Havana is a very complex process,” he said and “sometimes things get tied up on trains there for four or five months awaiting a merchant ship.”

Sierra reminded of the Helms-Burton and Torricelli Acts, according to which a ship that docks in Cuba can not put in at a US port until six months later.

The official said additional obstacles were the impossibility of purchasing spare parts for engines and the prohibition of carrying out transactions in US currency.

“The aim of those sanctions is to surrender 11 million Cubans to hungry and exhaustion, which is a genocidal practice,” Sierra stressed.

“But the Cuban people support the Revolution and its social justice project,” the minister concluded.