Washington Turns Cuba’s Fuel Crisis Into a Weapon—and the Fight Erupts at the U.N.
The United States and Cuba turned the United Nations General Assembly into a shouting match on Tuesday as Washington defended an economic siege that is helping push the island deeper into darkness.
U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz used the annual debate over the embargo to accuse Cuba’s government of corruption and repression. Cuban delegates hammered their desks and demanded a point of order. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez walked toward the podium and shouted, ‘You are a liar!’ Waltz answered: ‘This is America. Back up.’
The exchange broke diplomatic decorum, but the real violence lies outside the hall. President Donald Trump’s administration has threatened tariffs against countries that supply Cuba with oil. The warning has effectively cut fuel shipments, according to Associated Press reporting, worsening blackouts that already interrupt cooking, water pumps, telephone service and internet access.
That is collective punishment presented as foreign policy. It does not distinguish between a government official, a hospital patient, a bus driver and a child whose refrigerator stops working. Washington says it wants political change. Its chosen leverage is the daily survival of more than 10 million people.
The confrontation came as the General Assembly opened debate on its annual resolution demanding an end to the economic, commercial and financial embargo. The vote is scheduled for Wednesday. The measure cannot compel Washington to act, but it records the world’s judgment. Last year it passed 165–7, with 12 abstentions. Similar resolutions have won overwhelming support for 34 consecutive years.
A policy designed to make ordinary life fail
The embargo has lasted more than six decades, and only the U.S. Congress can fully repeal it. Trump’s oil pressure adds a new choke point to a system that already restricts trade, banking and investment. Reuters reported this month that Cuba is enduring shortages, inflation, infrastructure failure and a nationwide grid collapse while Washington intensifies its campaign.
Cuba’s government bears responsibility for political repression, restrictions on independent organizing and an economy that protects bureaucratic power while workers absorb scarcity. But those failures do not turn U.S. coercion into solidarity. A policy that deprives families of electricity does not expand democratic space. It gives the state another external enemy to blame while weakening the people most capable of demanding change from below.
Washington’s argument also collapses under its own contradiction. U.S. officials say Cuba should open more space for private enterprise, then impose sanctions that obstruct fuel, credit, payments and investment. Small businesses cannot operate without electricity. Farmers cannot move food without diesel. Clinics cannot preserve medicine on slogans about freedom.
Rodríguez, for his part, used the confrontation to defend Cuba’s sovereignty and accuse Waltz of lying. His government will point to the spectacle as proof that Washington’s objective is humiliation, not dialogue. That claim carries force because the United States has spent generations trying to dictate Cuba’s political future.
Yet Havana cannot treat every criticism of domestic repression as an imperial plot. The strongest case against the embargo does not require silence about one-party rule. It rests on a simpler principle: Cubans must decide Cuba’s future without a superpower engineering desperation to force an outcome.
The shouting at the U.N. captured two governments speaking past the people whose lives they invoke. Washington talked about liberty while tightening an economic vise. Havana talked about dignity while denying citizens full political power. Between them stand millions of Cubans navigating blackouts, food shortages and failing public services.
Wednesday’s vote will almost certainly condemn the embargo again. The harder question is whether international opposition can become material pressure strong enough to end it. A resolution cannot restart a power plant or deliver a tanker. But it can name the policy for what it is: an attempt to make an entire society hurt until its government yields.
That is not diplomacy. It is siege by other means.
Sources and image credits
Hero/card archive photo: U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, September 29, 2015; cropped and overlaid. It shows John Kerry and Bruno Rodríguez at U.N. headquarters, not the October 2026 confrontation.
Inline archive image: CSU/CIRA and NOAA/NESDIS via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, March 17, 2026.
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