The Cuban ambassador to the UN, Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, made a revealing slip this Monday by appearing on the 'America's Newsroom' program of Fox News to denounce the new sanctions imposed by the Trump administration.
The senior official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX) stated that these "penalize third countries and companies that trade with Cuba", inadvertently admitting in his social media that the island indeed trades freely with the rest of the world.
The contradiction did not go unnoticed. The writer and entrepreneur Álvaro Ferro Lugones accurately summarized Soberón Guzmán's slip on the social media platform X: "Thank you... because unintentionally, you just dismantled your own argument. You say that the sanctions affect 'companies from third countries that trade with Cuba'. So the inevitable question is: Where is the alleged 'total blockade'?".
The answer is that this total blockade simply does not exist.
The U.S. embargo against Cuba, in effect since 1962, prohibits direct trade between U.S. and Cuban companies, restricts transactions in dollars, and applies extraterritorial sanctions through the Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws.
But none of those regulations prevents Russian, Chinese, European, or Latin American companies from selling fuels, food, or medicine to the island.
The numbers confirm it: Cuba maintains trade relations with over 150 countries. China is its main partner, with trade exceeding 2.585 billion dollars in 2016 and an emergency aid of 80 million dollars approved by Xi Jinping in January 2026.
Russia signed a commercial cooperation agreement with Havana until 2030. U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba —frozen chicken, soybeans, corn, wheat— exceeded 370 million dollars in 2024, while total U.S. exports to the island reached 810.8 million dollars in 2025, a growth of 148% compared to 2021.
The regime has been using the term "blockade" for decades to imply an absolute isolation that does not exist, and that narrative has lost strength even at the UN: in October 2025, the annual resolution condemning the embargo received 165 votes in favor, the lowest level of support in over ten years.
The real problem, as pointed out by the user who went viral for the slip, "is not that money isn't coming into Cuba... the problem is who controls it".
The answer is the military conglomerate GAESA, linked to the Revolutionary Armed Forces, which controls between 40% and 60% of the country's foreign currency income, 95% of foreign currency financial transactions, and 95% of import and export flows. Its revenues exceed 3.2 times those of the Cuban state budget.
This foreign trade does not benefit the average citizen, the independent entrepreneur, or the worker. It is managed by the same state and military apparatus that has been in power for 67 years.
As summarized in the viral analysis: "It's not an issue of 'blockade'... it's an issue of monopoly, control, and lack of internal economic freedom".
The appearance of Soberón Guzmán on Fox News occurred in response to the new executive order signed by Trump on May 1, which imposes secondary sanctions on foreign banks that engage with sanctioned Cuban entities and blocks assets of regime officials in the energy, defense, mining, and finance sectors.
As of January 2025, the Trump administration has imposed over 240 sanctions against Cuba and intercepted at least seven oil tankers, reducing the island's energy imports by between 80% and 90%.
While the regime repeats its manual of victimhood, the great lie of the "blockade" loses credibility by the day: the projected economic contraction for 2026 is 7.2%, with power outages lasting up to 25 hours affecting over 55% of the territory, and it was the regime's own ambassador who, inadvertently, provided the best rebuttal to that narrative.
"The audacity is not in pointing out the sanctions," concluded the viral analysis. "The audacity lies in blaming external factors for what the system itself does not allow to be resolved internally."
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