Cuba accuses US of threatening countries ahead of UN embargo vote

Havana says Washington is threatening countries with retaliation if they refuse to vote against condemning its embargo.

Cuba has accused the United States of threatening countries with tariffs, visa restrictions and other retaliatory measures in an effort to get them to change their votes on an upcoming United Nations resolution calling for an end to the long-running embargo against the island.

Every year, a majority in the UN General Assembly votes in favour of a nonbinding resolution seeking a stop to the US embargo, which began in the early 1960s.

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The embargo, considered the longest in modern history, has been credited with exacerbating economic hardship on the island.

But on Wednesday, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said that the administration of US President Donald Trump was seeking to pressure members of the UN General Assembly to vote against the resolution this year.

He explained that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Washington’s ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz were personally leading the campaign, which he alleged had been going on for months.

“It is a new and dangerous way of conducting multilateral diplomacy,” Rodriguez wrote in a statement on the social media platform X. “It reflects the impotence of those who know they are in the wrong and whose only remaining recourse is force.”

Rodriguez said US officials had threatened to suspend cooperation programmes, deny visas to government officials and their families, and even back opposition parties in upcoming elections if countries refused to change their positions.

He also accused the US of urging some countries to abstain or skip the vote altogether if they were unwilling to vote against Cuba.

Al Jazeera has reached out to the US State Department and the US Mission to the UN for comment, but it did not receive a reply by the time of publication.

Heightening pressure on Cuba

The allegations come amid escalating tensions between the two countries ahead of the vote on the resolution, expected to take place on October 27 or 28.

The Trump administration has long maintained that the Cuban government — not the embargo — is to blame for the country’s struggling economy, and it has called for regime change.

On Monday, Waltz accused Cuban diplomats of harassing and intimidating participants at a US-hosted panel on alleged human rights abuses in Cuba.

Cuba’s UN Ambassador Ernesto Soberon Guzman and other representatives had confronted Waltz as he left the event at UN headquarters in New York City.

Speaking to reporters afterward, Waltz said that, every year, the Cuban government “propagates a lie through its annual resolution”.

“It uses excuse after excuse to justify its oppression, to justify the misery of the Cuban people, and what we are doing here at the US Mission to the UN is exposing those lies,” he said.

In a separate briefing that day, Waltz also acknowledged that Washington had been lobbying European countries to reconsider their support for the resolution. He pointed to allegations from Ukraine that Cuban nationals fighting for Russia weren’t being paid and that the money was instead going to the Cuban government.

“Yes, we’ve asked many of our European colleagues: Given this evidence from the Ukrainian government, how can they continue to vote for this resolution that is a propaganda tool for the Cuban regime and that is directly affecting their national security?” Waltz said.

The UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly in support of resolutions calling for an end to the US economic embargo on Cuba almost every year since 1992. The embargo itself has been in place for more than six decades.

Since the start of 2026, the Trump administration has intensified pressure on Cuba by blocking oil supplies and threatening tariffs on countries supplying the country with fuel, leaving Cubans to face more severe shortages of essential supplies and prolonged blackouts.