Statement: Cuba rejects US Presidential Memorandum which tightens the economic blockade

The anti-Cuban document released by the U.S. government on June 30, 2025, consists of a reissue and amendment of the National Security Presidential Memorandum No. 5 that the US government itself had issued on June 16, 2017, at the beginning of Donald Trump's first term.

Cuba categorically denounces and rejects both versions of the infamous document.

As a clear expression of the aggressive behavior and hegemonic purposes of that country, the original text and its current reissue include a whole body of measures aimed at further strengthening the economic siege and causing greater shortages to the Cuban people, in a futile attempt to seize the country and rule its destiny, as established in the Helms-Burton Act of 1996.

Since 2017 and under Memorandum issued back then, the US government began to implement measures to tighten the economic blockade to extremes and take it to a qualitatively more harmful dimension. These measures have remained in place for a period of eight years, even under   Joseph Biden's term of office, and are largely the cause of the current shortages and great challenges facing the Cuban economy’s recovery, growth and development.

The original Memorandum of 2017 has been the political platform that promoted, among other measures, the almost absolute ban on US citizens’ travels to Cuba. It is the one that led to the persecution of fuel supplies, the obstruction of remittances, and the measures against governments of third countries for accepting Cuban medical services to attend to their respective populations.

It is also the one that has promoted pressures on commercial and financial entities anywhere in the world to prevent their relationship with Cuba; the one that has encouraged the filing of lawsuits in U.S. courts against investors in our country; the one that ordered the slanderous inclusion of the Island in the list of States that allegedly sponsor terrorism, with all its nefarious consequences to the national economy.

The hostile policy thus defined violates International Law and numerous UN resolutions. It intends to substantiate the use of economic coercion as a weapon of aggression against a sovereign country, with the purpose of breaking the political will of the entire nation and subjecting it to the hegemonic dictatorship of the United States. It is not by choice or chance that, since 1992, the UN General Assembly has almost unanimously called for an end to the economic, commercial and financial blockade.

To justify their actions, both the original and now amended Presidential Memorandum refer to terms such as democracy, human rights, religious freedom and others. All these are concepts incompatible with the abusive and transgressive historical conduct of the US government. It also makes express reference to the determination to destroy socialism and convert the Cuban economy to capitalism.

The rulers and politicians of the United States have the impudence to declare that they act this way for the good of the Cuban people.

The challenges facing Cuba are huge and demanding, especially because of the US determination to destroy the national project that we Cubans have built in full exercise of our sovereign rights, including that of self-determination.

The US government does not care if Cuba is a peaceful, stable, supportive country with friendly relations with practically the entire world. The policy that the US implements responds to the narrow interests of an anti-Cuban and corrupt clique that has made aggression against a neighboring country a way of life and a very profitable business.

Havana, July 1, 2025.