(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-09-19 11:16

HAVANA -- The United States' 45-year economic embargo on Cuba has cost the Caribbean nation US$89 billion, Cuba's Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told local media Tuesday.

On the basis of a report on the blockade, which Cuba will deliver to the United Nations, Roque described the measures as the longest and most cruel embargo in human history, adding that the international community completely backs Cuba against the negative effects of the embargo.

The United Nations has condemned the measure for 13 consecutive years. In 2006, in the most recent vote on the issue, 183 nations voted against the embargo and just four, including the United States voted for it.

The blockade was written into law in 1962, three years after Cuban leader Fidel Castro took power after a guerrilla war in the nation, but the blockade was intensified twice in the 1990s: in the 1992 Torricelli Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act.

The United States bars third party nations from exporting goods with more than 10 percent US-made components and from exporting to the US goods with any Cuban raw materials whatsoever.

It also bars residents in the US from traveling to the island, and bars Cuban businessmen from using US dollars in international transactions or borrowing from the World Bank or the Inter-American Development Bank.

In 2006, Roque said, President Bush made the Helms-Burton Act ever more intense, aiming to return Cuba to the time before the 1959 revolution and eliminate its social and political changes.

"The US blockade aims to cause hunger, desperation and suffering for our people," said he, adding that it will create internal destabilization to bring down its socialist system.