Havana, January 4,
An editorial in Cuban news weekly Trabajadores asserted that this amount represents 20 percent of the island's import capacity.
Cuba, wrote the news weekly, was forced to pay an additional 130 million dollars in transportation costs, since ships that dock in Cuban ports are not allowed to do so in US ports because of the Toricelli Law. Due to the pressure exerted by the blockade, Cuba also had to pay an additional 155 million dollars, and another 200 million in extra import costs.
Because the blockade does not allow Cuba to carry out foreign trade operations in US dollars, currency exchange operations in 1998 cost Cuba an extra 260 million dollars. The trabajadores editorial pointed to the case of a young child who recently died of cancer -- very possibly because the blockade denied her access to advanced pharmaceutical only produced in the United States.
The editorial stated that in almost 4 decades of Washington's economic war, Cuba has lost a total of 60 billion dollars -- but that no one will ever know the sum total of the pain of a policy that attempts to subjugate the Cuban people by trying to create chaos, hunger and sickness.