The General Assembly opened its annual debate on the embargo on Tuesday and votes on Wednesday, the 34th time member states have taken up the Cuban drafted resolution calling for an end to the economic, commercial and financial embargo the United States first imposed in 1960. The assembly has called for the embargo to end on 33 previous occasions. Support has grown markedly since the first vote in 1992, when 59 countries backed the resolution, three opposed it, 71 abstained and 46 did not vote, and it peaked at 191 votes in favour in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
This year’s debate was heated before the vote. Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, interrupted the US ambassador, Mike Waltz, on a point of order midway through his statement on Tuesday, the exchange escalated, and the president of the General Assembly briefly suspended the session before the debate resumed. Waltz rejected the premise of the debate, arguing that Cuba’s crisis was the fault of its own government rather than the embargo. “There is no blockade,” he said, pointing to US exports to Cuba that he put at more than $876 million in the first eight months of 2026, and to shipments from Canada, Spain, Mexico, China, Russia, the European Union and UN agencies.
The tightening of the embargo under the Trump administration is the backdrop. UN News reported that the tightening has led to an energy crisis and possible humanitarian collapse, according to the UN resident coordinator in Cuba, Francisco Pichon, and that the World Health Organization has warned that energy shortages are taking a toll on health; in May, senior UN officials reported that more than 100,000 surgical procedures had been postponed. President Trump has also raised the possibility of military intervention in Cuba this year.
The resolution itself reaffirms the sovereign equality of states, non-intervention and freedom of international trade and navigation, voices concern over laws such as the Helms-Burton Act of March 12, 1996, whose extraterritorial effects it says undermine other states’ sovereignty, and calls on states to refrain from adopting such measures and to repeal those still in force. Rodríguez is due to deliver Cuba’s statement on Wednesday before the vote. The number to watch is not the outcome, which is not in doubt, but the margin: whether the United States and Israel remain close to alone against, as in most recent years, or whether abstentions and absences grow under this year’s pressure.