The President of the United States, Donald Trump, stated this Wednesday that, after "many decades," Cuba "is getting closer" to the United States. His words come just one month after the latest package of sanctions approved by the Department of the Treasury against the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and other figures such as his predecessor, Raúl Castro, within Washington's strategy of pressure on the Havana authorities and the maintenance of the blockade against the Caribbean country.
"Speaking of Cuba, after many, many decades, it is getting closer to us," the US leader pointed out during a public event held in North Dakota, without offering further explanations about what exactly he meant by that rapprochement.
Hours earlier, Díaz-Canel had denounced that "the blockade" of the United States against the island "has escalated to unsustainable levels to provoke a social outburst," thus underlining the seriousness of the impact of the restrictions. In this context, he insisted on the relevance of the session requested the previous day in the United Nations General Assembly to specifically address the blockade.
The meeting, titled "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba," is scheduled for July 7, as detailed by the Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, when presenting the item on the official agenda of the General Assembly.
As Rodríguez explained the previous day, the objective of this meeting will be to expose and condemn the "aggressive actions" that Washington has undertaken against Havana, including "the threat and real possibility of military aggression, the energy siege, and other measures of extreme intensification of the blockade."
It is worth remembering that, last June, the Cuban president announced a package of structural reforms aimed at advancing the liberalization of the national economy, using the market economy models of China and Vietnam as a reference. These measures seek to mitigate the effects of the economic and energy sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration.
In relation to these transformations, in recent days Díaz-Canel has insisted that the reforms aim "above all" to "save the revolution." "We are facing a complex dilemma that we can solve: how to give continuity to the process of socialist construction on a small island in the Caribbean that has suffered the longest blockade in human history by the most powerful nation in the world," the leader reflected in a statement released by the Cuban Presidency.
In the same vein, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz announced this Tuesday that "in the coming days" measures will be implemented aimed at granting "new powers to the socialist state-owned enterprise or decentralizing to the business system the possibility of approving wholesale and retail prices."
Marrero also alluded to the option of "resizing higher business management organizations; empowering provincial governments and Administration Councils to create, merge, extinguish, and liquidate local state-owned enterprises; making the approval and destination of after-tax profits more flexible, and decentralizing to the state business system the powers to approve salary scales, among others."