The UN General Assembly on October 28 called for an end to the US economic, commercial and financial embargo on Cuba for the 34th time, but with its weakest backing in two decades, adopting the resolution by 130 votes to 17 with 25 abstentions, according to UN News.

Last year the same resolution passed by 165 votes to seven, with 12 abstentions. The United States and Israel were among the countries voting against this year, while Germany and Italy, which had previously voted in favor, were among those abstaining, Al Jazeera reported.

The annual tally has tracked relations between Washington and Havana. When the Assembly first voted in 1992, 59 countries backed the resolution, three opposed it and 71 abstained. Support peaked at 191 votes during and just after the thaw in relations under President Barack Obama, and in 2016 the United States abstained for the first time, UN News reported.

The Cuban-drafted text cites the UN Charter principles of sovereign equality, non-interference in internal affairs and freedom of trade and navigation. It names the US Helms-Burton Act of 1996, whose extraterritorial reach affects companies and individuals in other countries, urges states with similar laws to repeal them and says tougher measures applied since 2017 have reversed the easing of 2015 and 2016.

The vote came as Cuba faces a severe energy crisis made worse by a US fuel embargo, according to UN News. Francisco Pichon, the UN resident coordinator in Cuba, has said the tightened embargo has led to an energy crisis and possible humanitarian collapse, UN News reported before the vote.

What each side says

US Ambassador Mike Waltz rejected the premise of the debate. “There is no blockade,” he said, arguing that Cuba’s problems stem from its own government. In his explanation of vote, he said American companies had exported $876 million in goods to Cuba in the first eight months of 2026, “including a quarter billion in fuel,” and listed shipments from countries including Canada, China, Mexico, Russia and Spain. He said President Donald Trump had committed $100 million in food aid that was being delivered through the Catholic Church, and urged delegates to vote no, saying the vote was “the only thing standing between the corrupt, kleptocratic, communist regime, and using this body and your vote for another propaganda victory at the expense of the Cuban people.”

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who presented the draft, said in his statement that the measures include a fuel blockade “equivalent to a naval blockade” and called it “an act of war, an act of collective punishment and a genocide proscribed by International Law.” He displayed a counter that he said showed more than $22.9 million in damage caused by the embargo since the debate opened. He said infant mortality in Cuba had doubled since the start of the US “maximum pressure” policy and that around 100,000 people were awaiting surgery. He described the $100 million aid figure as “misleading,” saying only a few hundred thousand dollars had reached Cuba, while adding that Cuba welcomed the aid. “Cuba is not a threat; the blockade is,” he said.

Rodríguez also said the US had “unleashed a wave of pressures, intimidation and blackmail against many member States” to change their votes. After the result, Waltz told reporters: “I’m satisfied that so many countries now, including major economies like Korea, like Germany and others have shifted their position.” Rodríguez said on social media that the United States was “once again isolated in its attempt to continue strangling the Cuban people,” Al Jazeera reported.

A heated debate

On October 27, Rodríguez interrupted Waltz on a point of order midway through his statement, and the exchange escalated into a heated row that led the President of the General Assembly to briefly suspend the session, UN News reported. On October 28, Waltz said Richard Tur de la Concepcion, a first secretary at Cuba’s UN mission, would be expelled from the United States for “assaulting an American diplomat,” according to Al Jazeera. Rodríguez, for his part, denounced what he called “the harassment and unauthorized filming of our delegation” by a US official, which he said required the intervention of UN security personnel.

Why it matters

The Assembly has voted to condemn the embargo annually for more than three decades, but US officials point to this year’s rise in abstentions as evidence that their diplomatic campaign to isolate Havana is working, Al Jazeera reported. “Diplomacy takes time, but now that we’ve had a tripling of countries that have shifted, we expect that to only continue to grow,” Waltz said.

Cuba’s government says US measures are deepening shortages of fuel, medicine and food on the island. UN News reported that the energy crisis has made life harder for people across the country, and that Trump has this year raised the possibility of military intervention in Cuba.

The caveats

Estimates of the embargo’s cost come from the Cuban government, and figures on US exports and aid come from the US government; neither set was independently verified in the sources used. A full country-by-country record of the vote was not available in those sources.

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