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UN Votes to Urge US to Lift Cuba Embargo for 33rd Time as Island Ravaged by Hurricane Melissa
"The accumulation of economic suffocation imposed from abroad for generations is equivalent to the destruction caused by war," said Venezuelan UN ambassador Samuel Moncada.
Oct 30, 2025
As Cuba was among the Caribbean nations hit by one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution calling on the US government to end its 65-year-old embargo on the country.
The final tally for the resolution was 165 nations voting in favor, with just seven nations opposed. Twelve nations abstained from voting.
This now marks the 33rd consecutive year that the UN General Assembly has voted in favor of a resolution to end the US embargo, which has economically isolated Cuba for decades even as the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, which had long been used to justify the blockade, ended more than three decades ago.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez told the assembly ahead of the vote that the US blockade was "a policy of collective punishment" that "flagrantly, massively, and systematically violates the human rights of Cubans." Nonetheless, Rodriguez vowed that "Cuba will not surrender."
The International Peoples' Assembly, a coalition of 200 trade unions and social justice groups, noted that the vote was taking place as Hurricane Melissa was "worsening the economic, structural, and living conditions of the Cuban people"—suffering that is likely to be compounded by the embargo.
Representatives from several other Latin American nations made the case for ending the US embargo during speeches delivered at the UN on Wednesday.
"The accumulation of economic suffocation imposed from abroad for generations is equivalent to the destruction caused by war," said Venezuelan UN ambassador Samuel Moncada. "Because the blockade is an act of economic war, aimed at subduing an entire population through hunger, disease, and death. This is the truth the US seeks to hide when they call this crime simply a political measure."
Walton Alfonsi Webson, Antigua and Barbuda's ambassador to the UN, described Cuba as a "vital partner" in the region and demanded that the US "remove the embargo and let the Cuban people breathe."
Colombian UN ambassador Leonor Zalabata noted that Cuba has played a crucial role in helping uphold a 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerrilla organization that agreed to disarm as part of a ceasefire deal that ended decades of violent conflict.
"Cuba has been, and continues to be, a trusted partner in efforts to consolidate peace in Colombia and across the region," she said.
At the UN, Latin American and Caribbean leaders demanded an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba — calling it “an act of economic warfare.” Dozens of nations condemned Washington’s sanctions and urged the U.S. to let Cuba breathe.
Watch what they said.#Cuba #UN #Embargo #LetCubaLive pic.twitter.com/Qr4up0dc4i
— Belly of the Beast (@bellybeastcuba) October 29, 2025
Despite overwhelming support at the UN for lifting the embargo, the resolution's passage will have no real-world impact on US foreign policy since ending the decades-old blockade would require an act of US Congress.
The latest vote to lift the US embargo came as Hurricane Melissa was causing massive devastation in Cuba and countries throughout the Caribbean. According to CNN, the hurricane was a Category 3 storm when it made landfall in Cuba early Wednesday morning, and it forced at least 735,000 Cubans to evacuate their homes.
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'We Have Lived This Nightmare Before': Latin American Lawmakers Condemn Trump Extrajudicial Killings
"US military interventions of the 20th century brought dictatorships, disappearances, and decades of trauma to our nations," the Latin American leaders emphasized.
Oct 23, 2025
Dozens of political leaders throughout Latin America are condemning US President Donald Trump's boat-bombing spree, which began in the Caribbean last month but has since spread to the Pacific Ocean.
In a letter posted by Progressive International on its X account, the Latin American leaders from across the region said that Trump's campaign of extrajudicial killings of purported drug traffickers is threatening peace and stability in Latin America, and is likely a pretext for further military intervention in the region.
"The Trump administration is escalating a dangerous military buildup off the coast of Venezuela, deploying naval forces in the Caribbean in preparation for potential armed intervention," they wrote. "The pretext is familiar. President Trump justifies intervention in Venezuela as a means to combat 'cartels,' celebrating lethal strikes against fishermen accused of carrying drugs."
The lawmakers then linked the Trump administration's current militarism to past US actions that had destabilized their nations.
"We have lived this nightmare before," they emphasized. "US military interventions of the 20th century brought dictatorships, disappearances, and decades of trauma to our nations. We know the terrible cost of allowing foreign powers to wage war on our continent. We cannot—we will not—allow history to repeat itself."
They called upon "all organized political forces across Latin America and the Caribbean" to unite in the name of preventing another "catastrophe" from occurring.
"Across our political contexts, we share a common cause: the sovereignty of our nations and the security of our peoples," they concluded. "We must stand together now."
The US military has carried out at least nine attacks on boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Ocean over the past seven weeks, killing at least 37 people so far. Although the administration has claimed that these boats were engaged in illegal drug smuggling, it has provided no evidence to justify this claim—and both Trump and Vice President have jokingly said it would be dangerous "to even go fishing" in the Caribbean, suggesting civilians could be killed in the strikes
Colombian President Gustavo Petro this past weekend said that the Trump administration had “committed a murder” after one of its boat attacks killed a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, who had been out on a fishing trip when the US military attacked his boat.
The Trump administration's boat strikes have been condemned not only by leaders in Latin America, but also by multiple US-based legal experts who have accused the administration of going on an extrajudicial murder spree. Experts have noted that the US has long approached drug trafficking as a criminal offense—not an act of war to be responded to with military force.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a US-based think tank, announced on Thursday that it was launching a new project aimed at tracking "US militarism, aggression, and intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean," including "US strikes on boats, threats against Venezuela and Colombia, and other aspects of US interventionism in the region under the second Trump administration."
Alexander Main, CEPR's director of international policy, said that the Trump administration's recent actions across Latin America represent "a dangerous new escalation with an open disregard for international law and agreements" that could have "profound implications beyond the region."
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'Peace' Has No Meaning When Right-Wingers Like Maria Corina Machado Win the Nobel Prize
As Venezuelan-American, I know exactly what Machado represents: the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
Oct 10, 2025
When I saw the headline "Maria Corina Machado Wins the Nobel Peace Prize," I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.
If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents. She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom.” She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects—as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown —have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.
Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela’s sovereignty, and denying its people the right to live with dignity.
Machado isn’t a symbol of peace or progress. She is part of a global alliance between fascism, Zionism, and neoliberalism, an axis that justifies domination in the language of democracy and peace.
This is who Maria Corina Machado really is:
- She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the Carmona Decree that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.
- She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
- She cheered on Donald Trump’s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of “combating narcotrafficking.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
- She pushed for the US sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class.
- She helped construct the so-called “interim government,” a Washington-backed puppet show run by a self-appointed “president” who looted Venezuela’s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.
- She vows to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defense.
- Now she wants to hand over the country’s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.
Machado was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics. Those weren’t “peaceful protests” as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it “resistance.”
She praises Trump’s “decisive action” against what she calls a “criminal enterprise,” aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE’s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by US migration policies.
If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.”
Machado isn’t a symbol of peace or progress. She is part of a global alliance between fascism, Zionism, and neoliberalism, an axis that justifies domination in the language of democracy and peace. In Venezuela, that alliance has meant coups, sanctions, and privatization. In Gaza, it means genocide and the erasure of a people. The ideology is the same: a belief that some lives are disposable, that sovereignty is negotiable, and that violence can be sold as order.
If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.”
Every time this award is handed to an architect of violence disguised as diplomacy, it spits in the face of those who actually fight for peace: the Palestinian medics digging bodies from rubble, the journalists risking their lives in Gaza to document the truth and the humanitarian workers of the Flotilla sailing to break the siege and deliver aid to starving children in Gaza, with nothing but courage and conviction.
But real peace is not negotiated in boardrooms or awarded on stages. Real peace is built by women organizing food networks during blockades, by Indigenous communities defending rivers from extraction, by workers who refuse to be starved into obedience, by Venezuelan mothers mobilizing to demand the return of children seized under U.S. ICE and migration policies and by nations that choose sovereignty over servitude.
That’s the peace Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, and every nation of the Global South deserves.
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