Cuba''s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez stressed that the hardening of the criminal US economic, financial and commercial blockade on the island ''will neither break us, stop us nor choke us.''
 
Rodríguez made the statement at a ceremony to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the International Press Center, an institution attached to the Foreign Ministry, where he asserted that Cuba will face up to the full activation of the Helms-Burton Act and other sanctions 'with all our capacity of resistance and victory,' he underscored.
 
The minister added that Cuba has also been forced to put up with the information blockade, but truth, ethics, coherence and public denunciation prevailed and will prevail.
 
Later on, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement it posted on its website in which it accuses the US Government of having no moral authority to judge Cuba's performance on human trafficking.
 
It recalls that on Thursday, June 20, the US State Department included Cuba in the worst category of its 2019 Report on Human Trafficking.
 
'The US Government has no political nor moral authority to judge any sovereign State, nor issue conduct certificates. It is known that this unilateral yearly report that has no international acknowledgement nor legitimacy fulfills purely political and manipulating objective, as a weapon of pressure on other States without any respect, consideration nor observance of international efforts to fight human trafficking.
 
The US Government deliberately disregards the exemplary and comprehensive work of Cuba in preventing, fighting and responding to this scourge; it ignores Cuba's policy of zero tolerance against trafficking, and conceals the results of exchanges the two countries carried out for over 5 consecutive years to share information and cooperate on this issue.
 
Cuba has gained international recognition for implementing the Plan of National Action to Prevent and Fight Human Trafficking and Protect the Victims (2017-2020), an achievement the US Government fails to attain, the statement concludes.