By Raul Antonio Capote on October 16, 2026 from Havana
image: Osval
Just a few days before the United Nations General Assembly examines, once again this year, the report on the need to end the blockade against Cuba, the U.S. government has launched an intense campaign of pressure and blackmail against heads of state and government from various countries.
The accusation was made on Wednesday by Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, a member of the Political Bureau and Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, via his account on the social media platform X. “The U.S. Secretary of State, nervous and anxious in the face of yet another defeat at the United Nations, is pressuring and blackmailing heads of state and government from various countries to change their vote against the blockade at the UN General Assembly,” wrote the Foreign Minister.
This is not a rhetorical accusation. Rodríguez Parrilla himself has revealed that the cost of the blockade between March 1, 2025, and February 28, 2026, amounts to 8,083.3 million dollars—the highest figure on record and 7% higher than that of the previous period. The cumulative total since the embargo began exceeds 178,700 million dollars at current prices.
Behind these figures lies a strategy that goes beyond mere economic suffocation. The pressure on UN votes is part of the same plan: to politically isolate the island so that the economic punishment appears to be a universal condemnation rather than a unilateral decision by Washington.
In this vein, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Fernández de Cossío described the mechanism behind this offensive. “It is not enough for the world’s greatest economic, technological, and military power to impose collective punishment on the entire Cuban people and to lower the standard of living and living conditions of the entire population with the aim of inducing a humanitarian crisis,” he stated on social media.
Faced with the political and moral isolation caused by this aggression, he added, Washington “devotes substantial resources to pressuring governments around the world to change their traditional stance demanding an end to the abuse and crime.”
The Deputy Foreign Minister went further in describing the behavior of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “He’s strutting from country to country and calling heads of state in a desperate effort to intimidate, blackmail, and dangle carrots before governments across the globe,” he wrote.
That image of the Secretary of State touring capitals with promises and threats is not a literary license; it is the description of a diplomacy that has turned blackmail into an everyday tool.
The pattern is crystal clear: when pressure fails to reverse the majority, it seeks at least to reduce it; every lost vote is then presented as evidence of Cuba’s supposed isolation, even though the overwhelming majority continues to support ending the blockade.
This year’s vote is scheduled for October 28, but the economic blockade is no longer enough; now they’ve added direct intimidation of member states’ representatives, the promise of benefits in exchange for a vote, and the fabrication of pretexts to justify the unjustifiable.
But what is at stake is not just the outcome of a vote; it is the very possibility that multilateralism can function as a space for sovereign deliberation. For when the most powerful nation on the planet pressures small and medium-sized countries to align their votes with its interests, it is not only attacking Cuba—it is attacking the very principle of the sovereign equality of states, enshrined in the United Nations Charter.
Bruno Rodríguez put it clearly: Washington is attempting “to silence the act of collective punishment it is committing against the Cuban people and to make the rest of the international community an accomplice to that barbarity.” This is an accurate description of what happens when blackmail becomes a method of diplomatic work.
Source: Granma, translation, Walter Lippmann