Miami sit-in calls to end U.S. blockade of Cuba

WASHINGTON, U.S.A., Jan 30 (ACN) Members of the Bridges of Love project and friends of Cuba in the United States reiterated their demand for the end of the blockade that for more than six decades has tried to suffocate the Cuban people.

In statements to the media, Carlos Lazo, the activist who coordinated the initiative, said that Cuban-Americans and Americans alike staged a sit-in in Miami to recall the moment when Democratic President John F. Kennedy decided to lay siege to the Island 60 years ago.

To the cry of "Cuba yes, blockade no!", the participants in the day's march ratified, as Lazo said, that "we are fighting for the Cuban people because we owe it to them".

Bridges of Love is one of the most active groups in the broad movement in favor of lifting a hostile policy kept in place throughout 11 White House administrations, both Democratic and Republican.

In December, Professor Lazo traveled to Italy for a pilgrimage that ended at the Vatican, where he called for an end to all coercive measures that cause suffering to the Cuban people. Likewise, in July 2021, members of the solidarity project walked from Miami to Washington D.C.—more than 2,000 kilometers—to gather in front of the White House and demand that President Joe Biden fulfill the promises he made while on the campaign trail in 2020, when he said that if he became president of the United States he would reverse "Trump’s sanctions", who during his mandate (2017-2021) enforced 243 provisions that tightened the blockade on Cuba, more than 50 of them adopted in times of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, more than a year after taking office, Biden has not rectified his policy towards Cuba which, for the members of Bridges of Love, would mean resuming the path of normalization of relations initiated in the last stage of his administration by Barack Obama (2009-2017).


On February 3, 1960, through Executive Order 3447, Kennedy made legal the economic, commercial and financial blockade of Cuba based on the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, enacted against the former German empire and its allies prior to the entry of the United States into the First World War.

The measure had been suggested years before by Lester D. Mallory—Deputy Secretary of State during the administration of Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961)—in a secret April 6, 1960 memorandum advising to deprive Cuba "of money and supplies, to reduce its financial resources and real wages, to provoke hunger, despair and the overthrow of the Government", a policy that remains unchanged six decades later.

Curiously, on March 12, 1996, another Democrat, William Clinton, signed Public Law No. 104-114, the "Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (Libertad Act)", known as Helms-Burton, which legitimized the blockade and strengthened its extraterritorial scope.