The group sent a letter to New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez in response to one he recently sent to members of the US House of Representatives.

“Menéndez has a lot of power in the foreign policy of the US Congress, since he chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Dan Beeton, director of International Communication at the Center for Economic and Political Research (CEPR), based in Washington, DC, told Prensa Latina.

The legislator, he recalled, “belongs to a family of Cuban exiles, so he has always been very harsh with the United States’ policy on Cuba and, in general, with the right-wing policy on Latin America.”

He explained that it is unusual for a US senator to take it upon himself to send an unsolicited response to a letter from members of the House of Representatives addressed to the President, Beeton said.

“It is a sample of Menéndez’s zeal to maintain the embargo (blockade), and another example of the political division among the most conservative Democrats, or the ‘mainstream’, and the most leftist faction that criticizes the sanctions and some other policies by the United States on Latin America,” he added.

On May 10, 2023, Congresswoman Verónica Escobar, whose district is located in the border area of El Paso (Texas), sent a letter to President Joe Biden, signed by 20 other representatives of the Lower House.

Many of those who signed the letter are also from districts located on or near the border of the United States with Mexico.

In their claim, they urged Biden to lift the sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, in part because they contribute to emigration to this country.

The letter received positive coverage in The Washington Post, Politico, The New Republic and other media outlets, and even former officials from the Barack Obama administration (2009-2017) condemned these suffocation measures, pointing out their connection to migration.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made similar comments to Biden when they discussed the US immigration policy a few weeks ago.

Just one day after the congressional letter, Senator Menéndez published a reply in which he opposed calls to reverse the sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela.

For the senator, this “will only betray our democratic values (…) Such an approach would do nothing to resolve the underlying factors that drive these crises…”

Menéndez did not offer any evidence, nor did he cite any research, to support his broad assertions that the sanctions are not encouraging emigration to the United States.

The letter from the economists and experts to Menéndez supported the position taken by Escobar and her colleagues.

In addition, it cited several studies that point to the serious economic and humanitarian damage caused by the unilateral US sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela.

Among the signatories are Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and writer Greg Grandin, economist and writer Ha-Joon Chang, and Martín Guzmán, former Minister of Economy of Argentina, as well as Francisco Rodríguez, author of a recent report on how economic sanctions affect ordinary people, and CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot, among others.

Last February, at the end of the State of the Union address, Biden had an unusual exchange, captured by a microphone when the president greeted members of Congress.

“Bob, I have to talk to you about Cuba,” Biden said to the Cuban-American legislator, who replied “Okay, okay” and as he seemed somewhat confused, the president insisted: “I’m serious.”

The US economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba qualifies as the longest in history against any country. Despite the fact that every year it receives the nearly unanimous rejection of the international community, this policy of strangulation has been maintained by Democratic and Republican governments for more than six decades.

During the Donald Trump’s administration (2017-2021), a policy of maximum pressure was adopted that generated 243 additional measures to reinforce the unilateral siege against the largest Caribbean island, which was inherited by Biden, whose administration, in general, has not departed of that path.

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