The Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel sent a video this Thursday to the II International Conference on Unilateral Coercive Measures, held in Geneva, to accuse the U.S. government of depriving the Cuban people of essential resources and to describe the energy sanctions as a "prolonged collective punishment."
The speech was addressed to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, and the special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, at a conference that spans the ninth and tenth of April in the Swiss city.
Díaz-Canel began his speech by recalling the arrival of the Russian vessel Anatoly Kolodkin as the central argument. The
"When an entire people is punished by depriving them of resources and essential means for their sustenance with the criminal intent of causing their economy to collapse," said Díaz-Canel, describing the situation as the result of "65 years of the most severe and prolonged economic, commercial, and financial war waged against any country."
Reactions on social media were immediate, with users questioning the official narrative and expressing frustration over the country's situation.
Many mocked the repetitiveness of the argument and labeled the statements as a "circus," while others insisted that the world should know how the Cuban people are struggling to survive amid power outages, shortages, and rising despair that has persisted for decades.
There was also criticism of the Cuban government for prioritizing politics over the urgent needs of the population. Some comments reflected resignation in the face of a prolonged crisis, while others denounced that the country is deteriorating more each day with no real solutions in sight.
The Cuban leader, in his speech, listed specific figures regarding the humanitarian impact on the island. He stated that there are over 96,000 Cubans, including 11,000 children, waiting for surgeries due to lack of electricity; more than 16,000 patients need radiotherapy, and 2,888 depend on hemodialysis, services that have been halted due to energy instability.
These figures are compounded by prolonged daily power outages, shortages of water and liquefied gas, the near-total paralysis of public and private transportation, and educational institutions that have adopted hybrid formats to sustain teaching activities.
"Beyond these figures, it is impossible to account for the physical and psychological exhaustion, the daily shortages, the postponement of dreams, and the media war that is waged, solely out of malice, against a noble, resilient, and supportive people like ours," stated Díaz-Canel at the UN forum.
The speech, however, omitted any reference to the decades of disinvestment in electrical infrastructure or to the regime's own responsibility in the structural crisis that the island has been facing for years.
The energy crisis intensified following the Executive Order 14380, signed by Donald Trump on January 29, which declared the Cuban government an "extraordinary threat" to national security and imposed tariffs on any country that supplied crude oil to Cuba, cutting between 80% and 90% of the island's crude oil imports.
This was compounded by the loss of Venezuelan supply —between 26,000 and 35,000 barrels per day— following the capture of Nicolás Maduro on January third, leaving Cuba nearly without external sources of fuel for months.
Trump himself authorized the entry of the Anatoly Kolodkin as a humanitarian exception at the end of March, while the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued License 134A on March 20, excluding Cuba from general exemptions.
Two days before Díaz-Canel's speech, the UN launched an emergency plan of $94.1 million for eight Cuban provinces, acknowledging the risk of loss of life due to the severity of the crisis.
The speech was broadcast by the Cuban Foreign Ministry on social media under the hashtag #TumbaElBloqueo and generated significant reactions on digital platforms, with opinions divided between those who blame Washington and those who point to the regime as the main cause of the island's economic collapse.
Díaz-Canel proposed the creation of a Human Rights Council working group and the adoption of a legally binding international instrument that demands the immediate lifting of unilateral coercive measures and accountability for those responsible.
"The determination of Cubans to defend our absolute sovereignty is total," said Díaz-Canel, assuring that the people support him, thus denying his responsibility in part of these 67 years of dictatorship.
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