Helms Burton Act tightened the criminal blockade against Cuba

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, Cuba lost more than 70 % of its foreign trade, a fact taken advantage of by Washington and the Cuban-American mafia to increase the economic, commercial and financial blockade, and to step up political and media actions of all kinds with the aim of ensuring the imperialist restoration of the island in a short period of time.

The U.S. government, in close alliance with the Cuban American National Foundation ("FNCA" by its Spanish acronym), focused its plans to further isolate the island and in that context ultra-right-wing figures in the U.S. Congress promoted laws such as the Torricelli law during President George Bush's term of office in 1992.

This strategy was intended to prevent any Cuban attempt to seek alternatives to its foreign trade, since the actions were extended to third countries that negotiated with the island, in flagrant violation of all international laws and norms.

But that legislation was not enough, and its promoters prepared another bill with the complicity of Jesse Helms, considered one of the most reactionary politicians of the 20th century in the North American nation, and by the right-wing representative for Illinois, Dan Burton.

Title I of the Helms-Burton Act tightened, at the international level, the application of the economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba and the corresponding sanctions, which were codified in a legal framework for the persecution of Cuban trade and its relations in the world.
In this way, the legal initiative was based on unprecedented pretensions, forcing an independent nation to reduce itself to the condition of a colony and submit to the courts, laws and Congress of the United States, which would henceforth determine the legal procedures and forms of government that the alleged post-socialist island would have to assume in order to be recognized as an independent country.

In its Chapter III, Helms-Burton indicated that the real estate, factories, means of transportation and any type of wealth expropriated or nationalized would pass to their former owners, including the lands that today are in the hands of the State, cooperatives or individual farmers.

In addition, it decreed the functions of the U.S. authorities and the affected parties to denounce and take to the U.S. Court any foreigner who "traffics" with "U.S. properties" intervened in Cuba, so that former owners can receive up to three times the value of the property.

If this logic is followed, all the national wealth would return again by one means or another to the descendants of the former owners, to rebuild the neo-colonial system of privileges that prevailed before the revolutionary triumph of 1959.

For example, according to the Helms Burton Act, the more than 100,000 inhabitants of Alamar or East Havana, in the capital, most of them homeowners, would, in the hypothetical collapse of the Revolution, become tenants of the descendants of the former owners of the land in that area, and as such would have to pay rents or be evicted from their apartments.

It is an illusion to believe that the Cuban people, after more than 60 years of feeling that they have benefited from the achievements of the Revolution, would manifest a late vocation of obedient lambs and would accede to the plans prepared by the descendants of the exploiters in Miami to take over the country once again.

The Helms-Burton Act changed from being a draft to its approval a few days after the downing, on February 24, 1996, of the planes of the terrorist group " Hermanos al Rescate", which despite warnings from the island to the US authorities continued violating the national airspace.

That incident provoked great anti-Cuban hysteria and media campaigns, a context in which the then President William Clinton expressed his support for that text, which on March 12 of the same year was signed and legalized as a law and since then has ruled and reinforced the largest economic, commercial and financial blockade in history against a country.