Helms-Burton act. Photo: Prensa Latina.

Scholars of this city addressed today different edges of the US Helms-Burton Act, whose Title III was activated on May 2 following successive postponements by US administrations since 1996.

During a television programme Dr. Olga Portuondo, awarded with the National Social Sciences Prize and also Historian of the City, alluded to the premise of changing everything that must be changed, expressed by Fidel Castro when defining the concept of Revolution, and considered that nationalizations responded to the need of transforming the economic and social panorama to address the aspirations of the Cuban people.

Portuondo referred to decisions made by the French Revolution in 1791, despite of being bourgeois when large tracts of land and other property belonging to the nobility were seized, as well as changes of that nature occurred in Spain in relation to Catholic Church properties and others of the kind.

On the other hand, Dr. Manuel Fernandez, a member of the Cuban Academy of History, referred to the fraudulent origin of many of those confiscated assets and, in particular, lands seized by US officials using dubious methods at the expense of farmers.

Dr. Fernandez recalled that in 1902 a neocolonial republic was established in Cuba, bound by the Platt Amendment for an almost absolute dependence on the U.S. that extended to mines, banks and many other spheres of the incipient independent life.

For Dr. Walter Mondelo, a lawyer, that legislative miscarriage is an enormous lack of respect for Cubans and to blackmail the world’s nations in their commercial relations