HAVANA -- Washington's 45-year-old embargo has cost Cuba more than $89 billion to date, wreaking havoc on everything from primary education to pest control and nearly all other facets of island life, the foreign minister said Tuesday.
Havana produced a 56-page booklet laying out its latest argument against the embargo ahead of next month's meeting in New York of the U.N. General Assembly, which has voted 15 years in a row to urge the United States to lift trade sanctions against Cuba.
Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque said the U.S. policy caused $3 billion in losses over the past year alone to the economy of Cuba -- which had a 2006 GDP estimated at $40 billion, according to the CIA World Factbook.
The embargo ''has reached levels of schizophrenia and made the last year notable for the ferocious and cruel way the blockade has been applied,'' Pérez Roque said at a news conference. Washington, he said, is bent on ``persecuting Cuban interests and attempting to beat our people into submission with hunger and disease.''
The U.S. sanctions bar American tourists from visiting Cuba and prohibit U.S. companies from doing business with the communist-run nation, with some exceptions for exports of food and farm products, medical supplies and telecommunications equipment.
On Monday, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez called the embargo ''a success,'' and Washington has long maintained the sanctions are designed to punish Havana for rights violations, not to hurt the island's people.........
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