CUBA SLAMS US ARROGANCE AT THE UN

On October 29, the UN General Assembly held its 33rd annual vote condemning the illegal US blockade against Cuba. This longest-standing of all unilateral coercive measures has aimed from the beginning to "bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government," in the words of Lester Mallory's 1960 memorandum. While the blockade has failed in the last of these aims, it has deprived Cuba of a total $2.1 trillion in quantifiable damages and caused incalculable social devastation.

This year the United States levied an unprecedented amount of pressure on other countries to avoid losing the vote by the same humiliating margins as previous years (for example, 187 to 2 in 2024). For all its efforts, the final vote this year was still a lopsided 165 to 7, with 16 abstentions. Just a handful of far-right regimes in Latin America and central Europe joined the US and Israel in opposition.

In the lead-up to the vote, Trump's UN Ambassador Mike Waltz unleashed a litany of lies before the General Assembly. He accused Cuba of propagating "fake news," sponsoring global terrorism, intervening in the Ukraine war, aiding drug cartels, and undermining democracy in the Western hemisphere.

So egregious was Waltz's string of falsehoods that Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez interrupted him with a blistering point of order. He condemned the US ambassador as "uncivilized, crude, and coarse" and reminded the audience of the leaked Signal chats scandal that had brought his career as National Security Advisor to an ignominious end. Left unsaid -- because everyone in the room knew it already -- was that each of Waltz's spurious allegations actually matched US foreign policy to a tee.