This most re­cent im­pact of the 50-year-old Unit­ed States em­bar­go against the Gov­ern­ment and peo­ple of Cu­ba ex­em­pli­fies its con­tin­u­ing anachro­nis­tic na­ture. More­over, in this in­stance, it has been more of an im­pact on Trinidad and To­ba­go, rather than Pres­i­dent Raul Cas­tro and his del­e­ga­tion, whom we wel­come to these shores, his broth­er, Fi­del, hav­ing pre­ced­ed him by over 15 years. All that has been achieved here by the US law that pre­vents its com­pa­nies from pro­vid­ing ser­vices to the Cuban Gov­ern­ment is that the host coun­try with a long-stand­ing friend­ly re­la­tion­ship with the US has been made to scram­ble at the last minute to re­lo­cate the Cari­com-Cu­ba con­fer­ence from the Hilton Trinidad & Con­fer­ence Cen­tre.

It must be par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­pleas­ing too for the Gov­ern­ment and peo­ple of T&T who own the Hilton fa­cil­i­ties, al­though it is man­aged by an Amer­i­can chain, to have to be dic­tat­ed to on T&T soil by an Amer­i­can law that has long passed its use­ful­ness and is out of step with to­day's re­al­i­ties. Un­der the Helms-Bur­ton leg­is­la­tion, any US com­pa­ny pro­vid­ing a ser­vice to the Cuban Gov­ern­ment or a Cuban of­fi­cial is re­quired to seek a li­cence from the US Gov­ern­ment. While there may be his­tor­i­cal an­tecedents that ex­plain this in­tractably bit­ter ap­proach, such mea­sures are out of step be­cause coun­tries all over the world, in­clud­ing Cana­da, the Unit­ed King­dom and sev­er­al Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, have long been en­gag­ing with Cu­ba, many of them with in­vest­ments there and their cit­i­zens tak­ing va­ca­tions in Cu­ba.

So too has the Unit­ed Na­tions Gen­er­al As­sem­bly, for many decades now, been cham­pi­oning the cause of al­low­ing Cu­ba to be re­lieved of this bur­den of the em­bar­go. The re­al­i­ty is that coun­tries all over the world, in­clud­ing the free west, have out­stand­ing democ­ra­cy deficits to an­swer for to the rest of the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty; an eco­nom­ic block­ade against such coun­tries would be deemed mad­ness. Since 1972, Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica, Guyana and T&T have es­tab­lished re­la­tions with Ha­vana in de­fi­ance of the US. Since then there has been much progress in trade re­la­tions and ed­u­ca­tion, with large num­bers of Caribbean stu­dents hav­ing stud­ied in Cu­ba.

Al­most every Cari­com coun­try has ben­e­fit­ed from Cuban ex­per­tise in the field of health, with Cuban pro­fes­sion­als al­so get­ting an op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­ter­act with their peers here in the Caribbean. In ad­di­tion to the sol­i­dar­i­ty state­ments that usu­al­ly emerge from con­fer­ences of this na­ture, it is ex­pect­ed that there will be dis­cus­sions and hope­ful­ly sig­nif­i­cant ad­vances in de­vel­op­ing trade re­la­tions be­tween Cari­com and Cu­ba. Out­side of this coun­try's en­er­gy ex­ports to Cu­ba, there is room for ex­pand­ing the im­port and ex­port trade be­tween the two sides.

Ex­pand­ing trade re­la­tions be­tween Cari­com and Cu­ba must be on the ba­sis of a deep, mu­tu­al re­spect for prop­er­ty rights, re­spect for the sanc­ti­ty and the ap­plic­a­bil­i­ty of con­tracts and prop­er arrange­ments for the repa­tri­a­tion of prof­its. In­deed, it was Cu­ba's na­tion­al­i­sa­tion and seizure of prop­er­ty held by US cit­i­zens in the af­ter­math of the Cu­ba Rev­o­lu­tion that is at the heart of the US em­bar­go and all of the bit­ter­ness that has flowed be­tween those two proud na­tions. The re­al­i­ty is that Cu­ba con­tin­ues to emerge from the ef­fects of the US em­bar­go and ob­vi­ous­ly part of that emer­gence is bring­ing change to the po­lit­i­cal sys­tem that has ex­ist­ed in Cu­ba un­der the Cas­tros.