Havana, Cuba.- U.S. lawyer Soffiyah Elijah affirmed that the Helms Burton Act, which internationalizes her country”s blockade against Cuba, is illegal and unconstitutional, as reported today in Granma newspaper.

The member of the ‘Venceremos Brigade’, in solidarity with Cuba, assured that three decades of legal practice allow her to assure, without a margin of doubt, that this legal monstrosity contradicts the United States Constitution.

She assured that this law complicity protects criminal acts and aggression against the sovereignty of other countries, ‘something that will never be legal’ and one of its articles allows establishing legal cases against companies or businesspeople of sovereign nations, without taking into consideration Cuban law and that of their respective countries. She recalled that just as in Cuban legislation, there is legal protection in the United States for the national government to nationalize when it determines so, and that the private property of a U.S. citizen can be confiscated without financial compensation.

Helms Burton’s hypocrisy is such that it justifies acts of financial aggression against Cuba and allows private U.S. citizens, even those who have already been compensated, to file legal cases against Cuban institutions or foreign investors, she stressed.

Elijah is executive director of the New York-based Alliance of Families for Justice and a prestigious human rights advocate for Latino and Afro-descendant communities who are victims of the U.S. justice system.