Global Policy Forum

Havana said Monday the United States' nearly four-decade trade embargo on Cuba had cost the Caribbean island $800 million in 1998 and more than $60 billion in the years since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.

State-run daily Trabajadores (Workers) said the sanctions caused last year an extra $130 million in shipping costs, $155 million in tougher credit conditions, $200 million in higher import prices, $55 million in lower export revenues, and $260 million in currency losses.

``The results of the economic war against Cuba can be quantified -- it is estimated that the blockade has cost our country (in total) more than $60 billion,'' the Trabajadores editorial said.

``However, no one will ever know the sum of the pain caused by a policy which, for nearly four decades, has sought to bring the Cuban people to its knees, trying to create chaos, hunger and sickness in our country,''

Washington imposed full economic sanctions in February 1962 and has maintained them since in what it terms legitimate efforts to help the Cuban people by pressuring Castro to reform his one-party communist political system.

Havana, however, has long blasted the embargo as an ''imperialist'' and ``genocidic'' measure. And international indignation has grown in recent years, with the United Nations, for example, voting 157-2 in October to condemn the sanctions.

Trabajadores said the world should know that ``real people'' on the island die and suffer as a result of the embargo, under which ``the U.S. government does not allow even a humble aspirin to be sold to its neighbor Cuba.''

The embargo, it added, ``has not achieved nor will it ever achieve its aims, but shows clearly the genocidic basis of the ideas which sustain it.''

The $800 million lost in 1998 would otherwise have been spent, the editorial said, on much-needed food and medicines for Cubans still living through a recession sparked by the collapse of Havana's former ally and economic sponsor, the Soviet Union.

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