As last week’s Kiskadee Watch Editorial described, on Wednesday October 28th “the annual vote at the United Nations on the crippling and pernicious US embargo against Cuba has again laid bare the farce of CARICOM unity.” Shamefully,Trinidad and Tobago voted with the US in opposing the resolution condemning the embargo. Guyana, Haiti and Jamaica abstained. Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica and St Lucia were absent from the room.
Kudos to Barbados, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, St Kitts-Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname for voting to condemn the decades-long embargo.
This week we carry the Open Letter sent by the Assembly of Caribbean People (ACP) to CARICOM Heads on October 20th, one week before the UN Vote. We preface the letter with this comment from David Abdulah from the Movement for Social Justice and member of the ACP:
“In the last paragraph of our Open Letter to CARICOM Heads we said this to you “The eyes of all Caribbean People are on you and history will not absolve you if you turn your back on our Caribbean sisters and brothers in Cuba.” Seven of you have brought shame on your countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica and St. Lucia by absenting yourselves from the room and cowardly not voting; Jamaica, Guyana and Haiti for abstaining and therefore in effect registering a vote against Cuba since there can be no fence sitting when it comes to the US blockade causing a humanitarian crisis; and Trinidad and Tobago doing Washington’s bidding and joining a tiny minority of 17 countries voting to continue the collective punishment of the Cuban people and with the PM, a Senior Attorney, trying to rationalise the blockade, which the UN Human Rights Commission states, comprises “unlawful unilateral coercive measures against Cuba contravene Article 2 of the UN Charter”. Heads, how can you now demand, with a straight face, Reparation from the UK, when you are complicit in a “silent Gaza” taking place in our Caribbean Sea?”
Open Letter to CARICOM Heads of Government
The United Nations General Assembly Resolution
by Cuba entitled
“Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”
Submitted, October 20, 2026
We Demand That
Every CARICOM Member State Must Stand with Cuba
Honourable Heads of Government,
The Assembly of Caribbean People is being supported by very many individuals and organisations in the Caribbean and internationally in this Open Letter to you. As you are aware, Cuba has tabled a Resolution titled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba” for consideration by the United Nations General Assembly on October 27/28.
This Resolution has been tabled by Cuba at the UNGA every year beginning in 1992. For the last thirty-three (33) years, Member States of CARICOM without exception have voted in support of Cuba’s Resolution. Indeed, CARICOM has consistently issued Communiques following Heads of Government Meetings calling on the United States to end the Embargo against Cuba and to also remove Cuba from the so-called list of countries that are engaged in state sponsorship of terrorism as there is absolutely no evidence to support such a designation.
In furtherance of CARICOM’s principled position several Heads of Government have used the opportunity of addressing the General Assembly at its annual Opening Session and speaking directly to this issue by calling on the United States to end the embargo. This year was no different as Heads made this call explicitly and correctly stated that there is a humanitarian crisis in Cuba that has been caused by the US blockade and the unilateral actions by US Executive decisions, one of which is the blockade of fuel to Cuba and another is the sanctioning of third countries and financial organisations and other firms from engaging in any trade and/or financial transactions with Cuba. We congratulate those Heads for articulating this principled position at the largest international forum.
Honourable Heads, regrettably it has become imperative for this Open Letter to be sent to you because the established policy of CARICOM to support, unconditionally, the call for the end of the Blockade has been disregarded, repudiated even, by some Member States.
As is well known, four Caribbean states – Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago – established diplomatic relations with Cuba in December 1972. At that time only Mexico in this hemisphere had diplomatic relations with Cuba. It was a bold and brave decision by these four, small and newly independent nations given not only the isolation that Cuba was facing, but also that this was at the height of the “Cold War” and moreover the fact that the US was our major trading partner. However, the Heads of Government of these four Caribbean states took the principled position that Cuba is a Caribbean nation with which we share a common history and that our foreign policy should be not shaped and determined by the national interests of others, including that of large states/powers.
As a result of our establishing relations with Cuba, CARICOM Member States have benefitted immensely. Cuba has offered thousands of university scholarships for our young people and thus contributed to the development of our human capacity and enabled young people who would not have had the financial means to access tertiary education. Indeed, some have served or still serve at very high levels of government. Cuba has provided health care professionals under its Medical Brigade agreements and these professionals have been crucial to the sustaining of quality health care to CARICOM citizens. Cuba has given us sports coaches to assist our high performing athletes. And there have been invaluable exchanges in culture and in academia. At no time has Cuba sought to extract anything in return.
Something changed with the coming of the Trump Administration in 2025. Some CARICOM Member States then began to calculate their foreign policy, not on long established principles, but on what the US defines as its “national security interests”. This is a clear repudiation of CARICOM’s strategy best articulated by Prime Minister Errol Barrow, who was one of the signatories that established diplomatic relations with Cuba,that, “we will be friends of all and satellites of none”.
Honourable Heads, the US national security interest is explicitly stated in the 2025 National Security Strategy. It is to “restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere… We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere”. This strategy is to achieve the objective of ensuring US-dominance and the continuation of economic and political power predicated on the colonial and imperial model of extraction, which enabled what some call “western civilisation”.
In the words of US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, at the Munich Security Conference “For the United States and Europe, we belong together…. We are part of one civilization – Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.. which gave the world the rule of law, the universities, and the scientific revolution.”
Rubio lamented the decline of the “great Western empires” in the face of “godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come”—and said that there will be a return to “the West’s age of dominance…We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,”
That analysis is of course historically wrong and is riddled with untruths. Thus, it denies the genocide of indigenous people; it does not recognise that the development of Europe and the US was built on the backs of enslaved Africans; it fails to consider the wealth extracted by colonial and imperial conquest; and it seeks to start world history with European enlightenment when there were advanced civilisations in Asia, Africa and the Americas centuries before. Rubio’s statement is fundamentally racist and Eurocentric and it rejects any other faith but Christianity, when we in CARICOM recognise our multi-cultural and multi-religious composition.
However, this ahistorical treatise cannot be dismissed as it was the basis for the US State Department’s document “Capital of 21st Century Communism Report”. Among other Nanci Stories that Report falsely claimed that Cuba is a national security threat to the US. This is then used to continue the crime of collective punishment of the Cuban people by the more than six decades long blockade and the unacceptable Executive Orders and other actions including the blockade of fuel.
Honourable Heads, it must be restated that the blockade was always intended to punish the Cuban people in order to achieve a political outcome of regime change that the US desired. As the April, 1960 Official Memorandum of then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs of the United States Department of State, Lester Mallory stated: “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship… every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba… a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
It is therefore unconscionable for any CARICOM Member State to give support or succour to the US strategy of creating hunger and a humanitarian crisis. Ironically, as the Trump Administration intensified the blockade of Cuba because it is a “threat to US national security by spreading communism in the US”, Trump was wining and dining the leader of the largest Communist Party in the world – China. But then Cuba is a small nation so it can be bullied. China cannot. The hypocrisy is patent.
Honourable Heads, we must be under no obligation to follow the Pied Piper called the US. CARICOM has always recognised and respected that every nation has the right to decide its own economic and political system and that people have the right to self-determination. It was therefore inappropriate for CARICOM Heads to depart from this and openly call – as some did – for Cuba to make reforms to its system, while one Prime Minister denounced the Cuban system. That departure by CARICOM Heads occurred at the February Heads of Government Summit when none other than Rubio was present. It was an act of fawning to the US that showed that some are indeed prepared to be a satellite of one.
This has been followed up by other decisions that demonstrate that some CARICOM Member States have turned their back on Cuba.
• The ending of the Cuban Medical Brigade arrangements;
• The decision by Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana not to agree with the Statement on Cuba issued by the CARICOM Council on Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR) at its May meeting, which statement called for the ending of the Blockade by the US and the removal of Cuba from the list of countries that engage in the state sponsorship of terrorism;
• The decision by Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada to abstain on the vote at the UNGA at its meeting of July 7th, 2026 on the Resolution tabled by Cuba calling on the US to end the Embargo; and Antigua and Barbuda and Guyana absenting themselves from the room and therefore did not register a Vote
Honourable Heads, the positions by these Member States totally disregard the findings of the Report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur on Cuba which Report is accessible on the website of the UNHRC –https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc6329add1-visit-cuba-report-special-rapporteur-negative-impact
One Report on that website, dated September 9th, 2026 stated:
“UN human rights experts today condemned recent measures by the United States against Cuba, denouncing them as an attempt to alter the constitutional order of a sovereign State through threats and coercion. They urged the international community and civil society to act swiftly to prevent a “silent Gaza” from unfolding on the island…The humanitarian consequences are already unfolding into a full-blown crisis, threatening the rights to health, to life, to food and to development. Food must never be used as an instrument of political pressure. Measures that knowingly deprive a population of the means to survive strike at the most basic guarantees of the rights to life and diminish the core of human dignity,
The US’s unlawful unilateral coercive measures against Cuba contravene Article 2 of the UN Charter, and form part of a broader regime-change strategy encompassing the decades-long embargo on Cuba.
The US Government must cease all threats and hostile acts against Cuba’s sovereignty and revoke all measures it has imposed on the country that stand contrary to international law…The Security Council and General Assembly should urgently address these threats as a matter of international peace and security,”
These are the undisputable facts. It is also significant that the US voted against the re-appointment of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights at the July meeting of the UNGA. It is also seeking to destroy the International Criminal Court (ICC) and has condemned the award of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to ICC Judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who is South African and who defended Nelson Mandela. She was the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and, until recently, she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Any international institution critical of US foreign policy is not tolerated. We must always remember that the ICC was brought into existence through the tireless and courageous advocacy by Trinidad and Tobago’s former Prime Minister and President, ANR Robinson.
The US actions against Cuba are unilateral, illegitimate and illegal. They amount to collective punishment which is an international crime. In fact what the US is doing is tantamount to genocide. There can be absolutely no reason for any Member State to abstain from supporting Cuba’s Resolution or from being absent when the vote is taken. Without exception every CARICOM Member State, in recognition of the UN Charter, and having a moral responsibility to humanity, MUST VOTE in support of the Resolution tabled by Cuba.
The eyes of all Caribbean People are on you and history will not absolve you if you turn your back on our Caribbean sisters and brothers in Cuba.
We are,
Yours truly,
David Abdulah
Member for and on behalf of
Assembly of Caribbean People
Regional Executive Committee
1. David Abdulah, Trinidad & Tobago 5. Hilda Guerrero, Puerto Rico
2. David Denny, Barbados 6. Cuban chapter of ACP, Cuba
3. Camille Chalmers, Haiti 7. Claudette Etnel, Suriname
4. Robert Sae, Martinique 8. Isabel Tejada, Dominican Republic
9. Angelo Meyer, Curacao
Supported by the Signatures of some 140 persons of which signatures were on behalf of scores of organisations from CARICOM countries and other countries in the Caribbean and further afield.
Discussion