The United States used United Nations headquarters on Monday to spotlight Cuba’s political prisoners, its overseas medical missions and government corruption ahead of the General Assembly’s annual vote on the U.S. embargo.

The event, a panel entitled “Cuba Libre: The Oppression Havana Hides,” was organized by the U.S. Mission to the U.N. before it votes on a resolution Cuba presents annually denouncing U.S. sanctions. It is part of the Trump administration’s expanded effort to chip away at Cuba’s diplomatic influence at the U.N., especially on an issue - the U.S. embargo - that is at the center of the Cuban government’s foreign policy and propaganda.

Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., opened the event by telling diplomats that “for 67 years the Castro regime has sold the world a myth.... The lie is that the revolution liberated Cuba, and that the Cuban people’s suffering is always someone else’s fault.”

Waltz cited a Miami Herald investigation into the financial records of GAESA, the military-run conglomerate that controls much of the island’s economy, showing it had $18 billion in current assets in 2024. He said the regime “can’t find enough power for its hospitals, schools, or people’s homes, but it has enough power for its prisons.”

The panel included two former political prisoners, opposition leader José Daniel Ferrer and artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara; Emilio Morales, who has studied the finances of GAESA, and María Werlau, executive director of the research group Cuba Archive, which documents the medical missions abroad. U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a New Yorl Republican whose mother fled Cuba in 1959, and Ukraine’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N. also spoke.

Otero Alcántara, who was released into exile three months ago after five years in prison, said he had been arrested several times before he was imprisoned in 2021. Videos the U.S. host showed before the panel began showed some of those detentions. He said that more than 31 artists are now jailed in Cuba for their work.

“All we were going for was proposing a different option for Cubans to decide. Our crime was to do art, to write a song,” Otero Alcántara said. Rapper Maykel Castillo Pérez, one of the authors of the song “Patria y Vida,” which won two Latin Grammys, is still serving a nine-year sentence.

Ferrer said he has spent more than 12 years in Cuban prisons, more than nine of them in solitary confinement. He said officials offered to suspend his sentence in exchange for public support. “They said, ‘you have to speak in favor of us,’ and I refused,” he said.

He urged diplomats to vote against the resolution Cuba presented, or abstain. “When you vote in favor of that resolution, you are turning your backs on the Cuban people who are hoping for solidarity from the free and democratic world,” Ferrer said. He called the text “plagued with exaggerations, fake data,” and said it “tries to present a criminal, tyrannical government as a victim when they are the victimizers.”

Ferrer also held up a photo of a prisoner who, he said, “looks like he just came out of a Nazi concentration camp.”

Werlau, who spoke about Cuban medical missions abroad, said a doctor in Cuba earns less than $10 a month on average. She said Cuban law bars doctors sent abroad who abandon their missions from returning home for at least eight years. She cited figures from Cuba’s National Office of Statistics showing that of the $34.7 billion the Cuban government obtained from exports of social and health services between 2018 and 2024, only 0.96% was reinvested in those services.

“If this isn’t modern slavery, what is?” she said.

Morales said GAESA has turned Cuba into “a mafia state.” He called the $18 billion in assets reported by the Herald “just the tip of the iceberg of all of the hidden money.”

The Ukrainian diplomat said Kyiv had confirmed that more than 1,000 Cuban nationals signed contracts with the Russian army between 2023-25 to fight against his country. Monthly payments of about $2,000 were a powerful lure, he said. The Cuban people deserve a future “not one in which their citizens are exploited as cannon fodder in another country’s war,” he said.

Waltz closed with a direct appeal to the diplomats. “Do not give in to this lie. Please vote no,” he said. “But at least then abstain or walk away.”

At a press conference afterward, Waltz said the resolution “talks about a blockade that does not exist.... There is no ring of U.S. Navy ships surrounding the island of Cuba.”

He said Washington had sent $100 million in humanitarian aid through the Catholic Church, and accused the regime of trying to control even that aid. “It’s completely unacceptable,” he said.

Jamie Fly, chief executive of Freedom House, who spoke alongside Waltz, said Cuba has been rated “not free” in every edition of the group’s Freedom in the World report for 53 years. It scores 9 out of 100, and zero on political rights. That makes it the lowest-ranked country in the Western Hemisphere. Citing the group Prisoners Defenders, Fly said more than 1,300 political prisoners remain behind bars.

“We need to stop allowing the regime to present itself as a victim,” Fly said, echoing Ferrer. “The real victims are the Cuban people. So I think all of the countries that are going to have to decide how to vote need to think about that.”

Cuba’s U.N. ambassador, Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, denounced the gathering minutes before it began on Monday. He shared a document calling the event “a puppet show” and dismissing the speakers as “criminals.” Then he and other members of the Cuban diplomatic mission staged a protest, yelling and calling the panelists “terrorists” as they went up an escalator.

“Cuba is here, not in there,” he said, reading a statement in English during the protest. “The representatives of the Cuban people are here, not with them. And the vast majority of the UN is with us, just as they will be once again on October 27 and 28.”

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez also lambasted the event, calling it “a deceitful spectacle.... With no regard for any item on the agenda or any topic of interest to the Member States, and in violation of the Organization’s conference rules, Mr. Waltz paraded a group of individuals—who have spent years living off the U.S. federal budget by engaging in anti-Cuban activities—before a mere handful of people in a clandestine room.”

He added: “Nothing can mask or justify the genocidal crime committed by the U.S. against Cuba—the energy blockade, the economic aggression, or the punitive measures.”

Rodríguez presented Cuba’s annual report on the embargo at a press conference in Havana in September, in which he accused Washington of “extraordinary pressure and intimidation” on other member states, while saying Cuba still expects overwhelming support.

He said the embargo cost Cuba $8.08 billion between March 1, 2025 and Feb. 28, 2026, the highest figure on record and 7% more than the previous year. He devoted much of his remarks to what Havana calls an “energy blockade” imposed by Washington since January to keep fuel shipments from reaching the island.

Havana puts the accumulated damage at $178.7 billion at current prices, but economists are skeptical of the figure because the government does not disclose its methodology and includes estimates of trade and financial transactions that might happen if the embargo were lifted.

A battle for votes

The spat has spanned several days.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Soberon accused Washington of using U.N. premises to promote a hostile political agenda against Cuba, and said “Cuba will not be intimidated, blackmailed or silenced.” He also criticized the organizers for keeping the event invitation-only and not naming the panelists in advance, asking, “What is the reason for so much secrecy?”

Waltz answered on X on Saturday. He wrote that the Cuban ambassador was apparently upset because the U.S. had invited former political prisoners and experts on forced labor and regime corruption to share their views.

The General Assembly is scheduled to take up the embargo resolution on Oct. 27 and 28. The resolution is not binding. Only the U.S. Congress can lift the embargo.

Soberón and Rodríguez also accused Secretary of State Marco Rubio of calling heads of state and government directly to press them to change their votes.

Rubio “is nervous and anxious in the face of a new defeat at the United Nations,” Rodriguez said in a posting on X. “He is putting pressure on and blackmailing heads of state and government from several countries so that they change their vote against the blockade at the U.N. General Assembly.”

He posted that a day after a call Rubio had with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele mentioned Cuba. According to the State Department readout of the Oct 13 call, Rubio urged El Salvador to join the United States and like-minded partners in advancing shared priorities at the United Nations. He stressed that “the Cuban regime will not make the reforms the Cuban people deserve” while it believes the international community is on its side. El Salvador has historically supported the anti-embargo resolution. Last year, despite Bukele’s close alliance with the Trump administration, it did not cast a vote.

The State Department has also taken its case to social media. Juan Pablo Segura, the department’s top official for the Western Hemisphere, wrote that supporting Cuba’s resolution delays reforms the island needs and that Havana uses the annual vote to convince itself it doesn’t need to change. In another post, he urged countries to reject the resolution, arguing that voting for it rewards a hostile regime that endangers the United States and the hemisphere.

Washington’s campaign did not begin this fall. In July, Cuba forced an extra General Assembly debate on U.S. sanctions. The United States objected but lost, 136-9 with 30 abstentions. But the vote showed how the Trump administration had eroded Cuba’s support among its Caribbean neighbors and key Latin American and European countries. Canada, Australia and 15 European countries, including Germany, abstained, and several Caribbean governments abstained or stayed away. During the debate, Waltz told the Cuban delegation, “This is not Havana,” after Rodriguez and Soberón began pounding their desks to protest his remarks.

Last year, Cuba’s embargo resolution passed with 165 votes, but 19 countries, including the United States, voted against it or abstained, a first at the UN. In 2024, only the U.S. and Israel had voted no, with Moldova abstaining. Argentina, Paraguay, Hungary, Ukraine and North Macedonia joined the U.S. and Israel in voting no. Several European countries that abstained cited Cubans fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

Other votes may be in play this year. Germany has voted for the resolution every year since 2002, but State Secretary Géza Andreas von Geyr told a lawmaker in a written reply earlier this month that Berlin’s position “has not yet been decided.”

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