Havana, July 16 (RHC)-- Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has announced the implementation of a system of measures to strengthen the national economy in the midst of the global crisis caused by COVID-19 and the tightening of the U.S. blockade against the island.

In an extraordinary session of the Council of Ministers, the president stressed that the strategy focuses on the economic and social boost of the country after overcoming the impact of the pandemic.

"Everything we are proposing is being done for the common good: to improve during times of crisis," he said.  

The Cuban president said that with a significant lack of resources, the nation faced the new coronavirus while collaborating with dozens of countries in need of health support.

"We are comforted and encouraged that no child, no doctor, no health worker died; that our health system did not collapse; that government management favored integrated action by the health system and our scientists with unquestionable results; that our medical protocols saved more lives than those implemented elsewhere," he said.

However, he added, with the satisfaction of those results the greatest efforts are now focused on boosting the economy.  Among other measures, the president brought forward the sale in freely convertible currency of a group of commodities to acquire foreign currency and increasingly expand the domestic market and industry.

More economic actors will also be linked to the domestic market to supply retail sales.  "The national industry becomes a source of products to also have a money that allows us to sustain the other things we want to sustain," he said.

Globally there is a deep crisis, expressed in the final collapse of neoliberal paradigms, the abusive exercise of world hegemony, and includes coups, interference, threats of the use of force, recalled Diaz-Canel.

Likewise, the head of state rejected the irresponsible way in which the United States has led the confrontation with the COVID-19, the police violence and racial problems experienced by the Empire to the north of our island.