1. The representative of Cuba said that, on 27 June 2000, the Mission of Cuba had received from the Mission of the United States a copy of an application for appeal by the companies Havana Club Holding S.A. and Havana Club International S.A. against Bacardi & Company Limited and Bacardi-Martini USA Inc. As in the case of the previous meeting of the Council for TRIPS, this information had been received at the last minute. He stated that this information in no way satisfied his request concerning the compatibility of Section 211 of the United States Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1998 with the TRIPS Agreement. Consequently, he reiterated his delegation's view that the United States had not complied with the request for information made by Cuba at the Council meeting of December 1998 in accordance with Article 63.3 of the TRIPS Agreement.
2. Continuing, he said that Section 211 was among the provisions which, in spite of growing international disapproval, had been issued by the United States legislature to intensify that country's economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba, and this intellectual property legislation merely added to the enormous list of legal and other instruments used by the United States Government to exercise political pressure against his country. It was not enough at this point merely to conduct a technical analysis of the subject in isolation, de-linking it from the whole series of measures used to set up, against Cuba, a blockade whose clear purpose was to bring his country to its knees through disease and starvation. Indeed, to fail to discuss in any depth the harmful effects on Cuba and on the entire multilateral trading system of this genocidal policy would be to relegate to the sidelines certain elements which were fundamental to Cuba. Quite apart from the technical violations of the TRIPS Agreement and the underlying principles of the multilateral trading system contained in Section 211, in the particular case of Cuba this Section cast doubt on the actual exercise of Cuba's sovereign rights. Accordingly, his delegation reserved the right to take appropriate action when he considered that the circumstances so warranted.
