Cuba hails UN vote against U.S. embargo as victory

Cuba's former leader Fidel Castro on Tuesday renewed his call for Washington to lift its long-running embargo on Havana after the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution to condemn the U.S. blockade earlier in the day. The resolution, entitled "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial, and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba," was passed with 186 member states voting yes, while only two, the United States and Israel, rejected it and three others abstained. Castro, in one of his columns published Tuesday by the official Granma daily, said the vote showed the United States was completely isolated in its stand on Cuban affairs. In another column, the former leader described the 50-year economic and political embargo as "criminal and genocide siege" against the island nation. "The vote is evidence to the need for ending the blockade along with the capitalist system which jeopardizes the surviving of humanity," he said. The blockade against Havana was imposed by the Eisenhower administration in 1962 to prevent the Cuban revolution from succeeding through economic wars. "The United States has never hidden that its goal is to overthrow the revolutionary government of Cuba and destroy the constitutional order that the people upholds sovereignly," Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla said in a speech at the UN General Assembly. Cuban authorities put the economic damage caused by the blockade at over 975 billion U.S. dollars, and said the figure did not "quantify the priceless pains suffered by the Cuban people." "The almost unanimous vote ratifies the world rejection of the U.S. blockade against the island and Washington's isolation in maintaining that aggressive measure," the official news agency Prensa Latina said. It was the 20th consecutive year that the UN General Assembly has adopted the resolution to condemn the U.S. embargo and demanded an end to it.