The United Nations General Assembly approved this Wednesday the annual resolution demanding an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba with 130 votes in favor, 17 against, and 25 abstentions, the worst result in the 34 years this initiative has been presented, according to the official UN voting board.
The most revealing detail is not the total number of supports, but rather who withdrew them: 12 countries that in 2025 had voted in favor or abstained now voted directly against. These are Austria, Barbados, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Lithuania, Morocco, Slovenia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Those 12 new opposing votes add to the seven countries that already rejected the resolution in 2025 and maintained their position: United States, Israel, Argentina, Hungary, North Macedonia, Paraguay, and Ukraine.
The shift in Trinidad and Tobago had clear precedents. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar had stated at the Caricom meeting in February 2026 that she would not support a dictatorship in Cuba or any other country, and she advocated for free elections and political plurality.
Among the 25 countries that chose to abstain, Germany stands out, having supported the resolution continuously since 2002. Berlin shared this stance with Albania, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Honduras, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Poland, and Romania, among others.
The decline is even more pronounced when referencing the historic drop of 2025, when the resolution received 165 votes in favor and only seven against. In just one year, Cuba lost 35 supporters and the number of rejections more than doubled. Extending the comparison to 2024, when the resolution garnered 187 favorable votes and just two against, the collapse is even more dramatic: in two years, support decreased by 57 and rejections multiplied by more than eight.
The deterioration had been anticipated. In July 2026, a procedural vote to authorize an extraordinary debate on the embargo received only 136 votes in favor, with Trinidad and Tobago and Germany already altering their historical pattern at that time.
The immediate context of the vote was marked by a tense debate the day before. The chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla physically approached the podium where the American ambassador Michael Waltz was speaking, forcing the Assembly president, Khalilur Rahman, to briefly suspend the session with a terse "Please return to your seat."
During that intervention, Waltz displayed to the delegates photographs of Fidel Castro’s Rolex watches valued at $40,000, Hermès ties, and Montblanc pens belonging to Díaz-Canel, as well as properties owned by the Castro family. He also cited a Miami Herald investigation indicating that the military business conglomerate GAESA amassed $18 billion in profits and $14 billion in cash in secret accounts.
Despite the historic outcome, the Cuban Foreign Ministry celebrated the vote on social media with a graphic proclaiming "Victory for Cuba" and the slogan "Cuba is not a threat, the blockade is."
The resolution is not legally binding: its approval does not change or lift the embargo, the removal of which depends solely on the United States Congress. The historical peak in favor of the regime was recorded in 2016, during the thaw with the Obama administration, when the resolution received 191 votes in favor and none against.
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