Miguel Díaz-Canel described the government of Donald Trump as "fascist" during his closing speech at the International Solidarity Meeting with Cuba, held at the Palace of Conventions in Havana in front of 766 foreign delegates from 152 organizations in 36 countries.
The event took place as part of the May Day celebrations, a day after the parade at the Anti-Imperialist Tribune, and comes at the peak of the highest escalation of tensions between Cuba and the United States in decades.
"However, it is when capitalism and the empire are in crisis that the most ultraconservative ideas resurface. This is why fascism is reemerging at this moment. And the current government of the United States is a fascist government," stated the Cuban leader.
Díaz-Canel extended his accusations to what he described as a triple offensive from Washington: "We are facing an ideological war, a cultural war, and a media war," he stated, arguing that the United States seeks to "dominate the world" and appropriate "the minds" of the peoples of the Global South.
The leader also used his speech to defend the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro, whom he described as the "legitimate president of the Bolivarian Revolution," and accused Washington of having created a "media narrative" to justify his capture.
Regarding Iran, Díaz-Canel rhetorically asked: "Who is talking about using the nuclear bomb? The government of the United States," referring to the ongoing conflict.
The speech came one day after Trump signed a second executive order that expands sanctions against the Cuban regime in three areas: sectoral sanctions in energy, defense, mining, and finance; global financial persecution of banks from third countries that operate with Cuban entities; and immediate enforcement without a grace period.
This measure complements Executive Order 14380 of January 29, 2026, which declared Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to U.S. national security and imposed an energy embargo that reduced Cuban crude oil imports by between 80% and 90%.
Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged the seriousness of the energy situation in the same speech: "We were without fuel for four months until a fuel ship from Russia arrived, which helped us change the energy situation in the last 15 days. But that oil is already running out these days and we do not know when more fuel will enter Cuba."
The night before, Trump had threatened to send the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to the shores of Cuba during a private dinner in West Palm Beach, making the action contingent on the completion of military operations in Iran.
Díaz-Canel responded to those threats on Facebook with the message «no aggressor, no matter how powerful, will find surrender in Cuba», under the slogan #TheHomelandIsDefended.
The chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, present at the event, described the new sanctions as "reprehensible, illegal, abusive, and ridiculous" and warned that "Cuba would be a hornet's nest; Cuba would be a death trap" for any military intervention.
The use of the term "fascist" by Díaz-Canel is not new: as early as March 2026, he had spoken about the "resurgence of fascism" attributed to the United States, a common rhetorical device of the regime in front of international audiences expressing solidarity while it maintains more than 800 political prisoners, the highest number in the Americas.
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