The Cuban Government asks the Ibero-American Summit to join the rejection of the embargo

The president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, in Havana. Alejandro Azcuy (efe)

The Cuban government took advantage of its participation in the XXVIII Ibero-American Summit this Thursday to ask the other 21 countries that make up the community to join in rejecting the embargo on the island.

Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed his attendance at the meeting to be held on Friday and Saturday in Santo Domingo, although the Havana delegation has already participated in a meeting on regional cooperation.

In addition to calling for facilitating "financial and technology transfers to developing countries and equitable access to resources that reverses the tremendous inequalities," Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez has spoken out on the relationship with the United States.

“We trust that this meeting in the sister Dominican Republic will demonstrate the firm rejection of the arbitrary and unilateral US classification of our country as a sponsor of terrorism and we hope to count on the traditional and valuable support of Ibero-America at the summit for the just claim to put an end to the criminal and illegal blockade imposed against the Cuban people, intensified to unprecedented extremes during the pandemic," said Rodríguez in a video broadcast through social networks.

The condemnation of the commercial embargo against Cuba is a habitual claim of Havana in international forums.

The majority of the United Nations has manifested this repudiation on several occasions and the European Union usually joins this type of resolution en bloc.

The fight for the lifting of the blockade, established by John F. Kennedy in 1962, now reaches the Dominican Republic, where the countries plan to define agreements that are not strictly political on financial architecture, climate change, food security and digital inclusion.

Despite the deep ideological differences between the different governments in Latin America, the claim of the Cuban authorities has always been well received in the region.

One of its main supporters is the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who, however, did not travel to Santo Domingo to participate in the summit.

Another is the Colombian Gustavo Petro, who also condemned the inclusion of Cuba on the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, a sanction that Washington renewed at the end of February.

The island will be the headquarters, after Venezuela and Mexico, of the next cycle of peace talks between the Executive and the National Liberation Army (ELN).

This same Thursday, the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has ruled out excluding the country from the list.

"Clearly not", he has answered when asked about it.

Follow all the international information on