India has joined the international community to back a United Nations resolution seeking an early withdrawal of an economic, commercial and financial embargo on Cuba by the United States spanning five decades.
Except for the US and Israel, 191 of the 193-member countries of the United Nations on Wednesday voted in favour of the General Assembly resolution.
US had imposed the trade embargo on Cuba in 1959. This was the height of the Cold War.
It has remained in force and can only be lifted by the US Congress, which has steadfastly rejected such a move.
Introducing the resolution, Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodriguez Parrilla alleged the new US policy on Cuba was intended to take relations back to a past of confrontation.
Notably, in 2016, both the US and Israel had abstained from the vote for the first time since it was tabled in 1992.
India stood with those in support of the resolution.
As the world’s largest democracy with abiding faith in multilateralism, India stands in solidarity with the international community in its unambiguous rejection of domestic laws having extraterritorial impact.MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay to the General Assembly
The Cuban Foreign Minister said on 16 June that the US President Donald Trump announced a series of measures intended to tighten the blockade, in a hostile speech before an audience made up of staunch followers of the Batista regime, annexationists and terrorists.
President Trump does not have the least moral authority to question Cuba. He is heading a Government of millionaires destined to implement savage measures against lower-income families, poor people, minorities and immigrants.Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodriguez Parrilla
Voting against this annual resolution for the 25th time in 26 years, the US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said, the UN opposes this resolution in continued solidarity with the Cuban people and in the hope that they will one day be free to choose their own destiny.
The Russian representative, Vassily A Nebenzia called the embargo a relic of the past, and a glaring interference in the internal affairs of a State.
The embargo was not just a discriminatory practice, unfair and pointless, it undermined the basis for regional and global stability by making sanctions a way of life, he said.
Nebenzia also said that while his country had welcomed the US abstaining from the vote in 2016, any expected normalisation of relations had been halted by the new administration in Washington DC.
What we are hearing today is hostile cold war rhetoricRussian representative Vassily A Nebenzia
(With PTI inputs)
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