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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 17, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Even U.S. allies defy anti-Cuba sanctions

By Judi Cheng

Worldwide opposition to the anti-Cuba Helms-Burton law gained momentum in September and early October. President Bill Clinton signed Helms-Burton into law last spring. In a move to tighten the already harsh criminal U.S. blockade of Cuba, Helms-Burton imposes sanctions on foreign companies doing business with Cuba.

The law has been denounced worldwide-by Cuba's allies, but also by Washington's imperialist rivals. It has been condemned as brazen interference in sovereign countries' rights to conduct their own affairs-and also as a bid to force other countries to join the U.S. government's war on Cuba.

In many of those countries, like Mexico and most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, Canada, and Europe-in fact, in most of the world-the masses of people strongly support the Cuban revolution. Even among the imperialists in countries like France, the bourgeoisie wants to pursue its own course and not submit to U.S. dictates.

International struggle

On Sept. 19 Mexico's Chamber of Deputies voted 317 to one to pass an "antidote" to the anti-Cuba law, ratifying a similar vote by the Mexican Senate. Under the new law, Mexican companies that allow themselves to be sanctioned by the U.S. law will be fined about $300,000. They will be fined $150,000 if they provide information about themselves to the U.S. courts in cases related to Helms-Burton.

The law was written in direct defiance of the United States and its Helms-Burton law.

Mexico, along with other U.S. allies like Canada and the European Union, has condemned Helms-Burton for violating international law by punishing countries that do business with Cuba.

On Oct. 1, the European Union announced it would challenge Helms-Burton in a new court of world trade created by the World Trade Organization. Almost immediately afterward, the Canadian government joined the challenge.

Washington has barred more than a dozen executives from a Canadian mining firm and a Mexican telecommunications company from entering the United States because of their business in Cuba.

In September, President Clinton sent Commerce Under-Secretary Stuart Eizen stat on a tour through Latin America and Europe trying to soften the opposition to Helms-Burton. Eizenstat threatened the European Union that any effort to take its case to the World Trade Organization would be "ill-advised."

But he still met with fierce opposition. Eizenstat's earlier attempts to win European support for coordinated action against Cuba had also been unsuccessful.

Under the Helms-Burton Act, the State Department has already banned several leading Canadian and British executives from entering the United States because their companies are now operating facilities that were seized from U.S. firms nearly four decades ago, during the Cuban Revolution. Under pressure from counter-revolutionary Cuban-Americans in Florida and New Jersey-key states in the presidential election-Clinton also gave U.S. citizens the right to sue those companies in American courts.

A similar law-the Kennedy-D'Amato Act-imposes sanctions on foreign companies that invest more than $40 million in Libya and Iran. While these sanctions and the Helms-Burton Act have caused anger abroad, they have hardly been mentioned in the presidential election.

The World Trade Organization does not have the power to overturn an act of the U.S. Congress. But it could authorize European countries, Canada and Mexico to take counter-action against these U.S-imposed restrictions.

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