Cuban regime diplomats staged a repudiation event this Monday at the United Nations headquarters in New York against activists participating in the event "Cuba Libre: The Oppression that Havana Hides", organized by the Permanent Mission of the United States to the UN.
José Daniel Ferrer, founder of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and former political prisoner, immediately reported it on his Facebook account: "We have just been subjected to an act of repudiation at the @UN by Cuban communists."
According to Ferrer, Cuban diplomats shouted "terrorists" and "out of the UN" at the panelists while the event was taking place, broadcast live by UN Web TV for nearly two hours.
The panel addressed the situation of political prisoners in Cuba, the alleged trafficking of Cuban medical professionals, and the regime's corruption.
Alongside Ferrer were the artist and activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, released after five years in prison and forced to leave Cuba in July 2026, and Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, co-founder of the Cuban Democratic Directorate and a regular figure at international human rights forums.
Acts of repudiation are a repressive practice characteristic of the regime: mobs organized by the state that insult, threaten, and attack dissidents and activists within Cuba. Monday's episode represents an exportation of that tactic to the most visible multilateral stage in the world.
The event took place at a time of heightened diplomatic tension. The permanent representative of Cuba to the UN, Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, had attempted to prevent it from being held days earlier, describing it as a "politically motivated maneuver, organized in a questionable manner, whose clear purpose is to attack Cuba."
Soberón argued that the act violated the UN administrative instruction ST/AI/2019/4, which requires that events held in its facilities align with the purposes of the Charter. "The United Nations is not a platform for political persecution, interference in the internal affairs of States, nor for campaigns aimed at undermining their sovereignty," he stated.
The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, responded that the event brought together former political prisoners and experts on forced labor and corruption, and defended Secretary of State Marco Rubio's approach to Cuba as "perfectly healthy."
The chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla had accused Rubio of "pressuring and blackmailing" world leaders to change their votes in the annual General Assembly vote on the U.S. embargo against Cuba, scheduled for October 27 and 28.
International support for that resolution has steadily declined: 187 votes in 2024, 165 in October 2025, and only 136 in the extraordinary session of July 2026, the lowest level in over a decade.
More than 554 Cuban activists and organizations, including Ferrer and Gutiérrez Boronat, published a letter urging democratic governments to vote against or abstain on October 28, arguing that supporting the resolution benefits the regime and not the Cuban people. The initiative garnered over 1,000 total endorsements.
The Under Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Juan Pablo Segura, warned that supporting the Cuban resolution “delays the urgent need for political and economic reforms” on the island.
Filed under: