Cuba Tells UN The World Is Sliding Toward 'The Law Of The Jungle' Under A US Energy Blockade

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 12 Of 15

Cuba told the UN General Assembly that the international system was dangerously close to falling into "the law of the jungle", as Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla accused the United States of imposing an "energy blockade" that has repeatedly brought down the island's power grid.

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Addressing the General Debate on Saturday, September 26, Rodríguez said international law and the founding principles of the UN, among them the sovereign equality of States, were under "permanent attack" from expanding militarism and economic coercion. He called Washington's aim of imposing peace through force absurd and unachievable. He opened by recalling that 66 years earlier, almost to the hour, Fidel Castro had addressed the Assembly from the same podium.

The centre of the speech was an account of US pressure since January. "Since January, 2026, this aggression has strengthened and become crueler and more dangerous, with the imposition of an energy blockade that, by resorting to intimidation and coercion, prevents any country from exporting fuel to Cuba," he said, describing it as the equivalent of a naval blockade, which he said international law classifies as an act of war.

The measures followed the US operation in Venezuela in January, which cut Cuba off from Venezuelan oil. Cuba's grid has collapsed at least six times since the start of the year, leaving millions without electricity and disrupting water supply, cooking and communications. Rodríguez said more than 7,000 shipping containers, many carrying medicines, medical supplies and food paid for by Cuban firms, were stranded in ports abroad.

He spoke four days after President Donald Trump told the Assembly that Cuba was "an absolutely failed state" whose government "will fall", prompting the Cuban delegation to walk out. Trump said his administration was seeking "a fundamental change" in Cuba and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was involved in talks with Havana. Asked by reporters on the day of Rodríguez's speech, Trump said: "I don't think we'll need the military."

Rodríguez said Cuba was making structural economic and social changes while preserving its socialist model, and repeated Havana's offer of dialogue with Washington "on the basis of responsibility, respect, sovereign equality, the observance of International Law, without any interference in the internal affairs of States and without preconditions".

He urged member states to defend and reform the UN, making it more democratic and effective, before it became "an unrealized dream of great promises".

Cuba did not stand alone. China's Vice President Han Zheng urged "the relevant country" to lift the blockade and sanctions immediately. South Africa called for an end to the blockade and for Cuba's removal from the US list of State sponsors of terrorism. Russia's Sergey Lavrov repeated Moscow's call to lift what he called the tightened US blockade, and Nicaragua's Co-Foreign Minister Valdrack Jaentschke expressed firm solidarity with the Cuban people.

For many developing countries, Cuba has long been the clearest case of unilateral sanctions imposed outside the UN framework. The General Assembly has called for an end to the US embargo in annual resolutions since 1992.

The national statements delivered at this year's UN General Assembly left little doubt about how far the ground has shifted. Opening the debate, Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders that "we are clearly moving towards a multipolar world" and that the movement is irreversible, though he warned it could take the shape of fragmentation and transactionalism rather than a networked order rooted in international law. The backdrop was hard to miss: a US-Israeli war with Iran nearly seven months old, the US capture of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US President who used the same podium to say he was weighing a deal with Tehran against "annihilating" it. Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the World Trade Organization was on life support and condemned the use of tariffs as "a weapon of coercion and blackmail", while India's S. Jaishankar declared that the post-1945 order is giving way to new realities. Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Spain's Pedro Sánchez, from very different vantage points, both called for an end to the veto held by the Security Council's five permanent members. Russia's Sergey Lavrov went further, telling the Assembly that "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok" and that a fairer, multipolar order was emerging. What remains unsettled is not whether power is spreading, but whether the institutions built in 1945 can adjust fast enough to hold it together.