Havana, Cuba.- The general director for the United States at the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, described as a challenge to the international community the escalation in Washington’s hostility against the island.

The United States is once again challenging the international community, which, on November 1, almost unanimously rejected its outlawed and irreverent conduct in the light of the order among nations’, said the diplomat on Twitter regarding the State Department’s announcement of new punitive measures.

On Wednesday, the United States announced the expansion of the list of Cuban companies restricted for US citizens, to which 26 new subcompanies will be added on Thursday.

Hotels in important tourist destinations in Havana, Varadero and the keys off the central province of Villa Clara, as well as shops and shopping centers are the new targets of the aggressive policy promoted by President Donald Trump since occupied the White House in January 2017, a position that is part of the efforts to dismantle the bilateral rapprochement initiated with his predecessor, Barack Obama. Fernandez de Cossio referred in his tweet to the approval on November 1 at the United Nations General Assembly of a resolution – the twenty-seventh since 1992 – that advocates the lifting the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed on Cuba for almost 60 years.

On that day, 189 of the 193 member States of the multilateral organization backed the text.

The escalation in Washington’s anti-Cuban restrictions also met with criticism in the US, where calls for a good neighbor relationship between the two nations are growing.

The president of the Engage Cuba coalition, James Williams, questioned the expansion of the list of Cuban companies restricted to US citizens and exceeding 200.

The Trump administration publishes the updated list of sanctioned companies in Cuba. He rearranges the deck chairs on a sinking ship, Williams wrote on Twitter.

For his part, Ben Rhodes, who was deputy national security advisor to former President Obama, said on Twitter that these sanctions will not lead to the changes Washington wants in the island’s government.

There is 100 percent certainty that the US blockade is affecting the Cuban people. What a sick and stupid policy’, he added.