Washington Is Aiming Ukraine’s Cuban-Recruit Claims at Europe’s Embargo Votes

The United States will lose the October 27–28 vote on its Cuba embargo. It has lost the same vote every year since 1992. The point of this week’s pressure campaign in New York was never the tally. It was Europe’s share of it, and Ukraine’s delegation just handed Washington its sharpest argument against those votes.

The giveaway came in a briefing on Monday, when US ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz was asked about the lobbying of European delegations. He didn’t hedge. The target was explicit. “Yes, we’ve asked many of our European colleagues,” he said. “Given this evidence from the Ukrainian government, how can they continue to vote for this resolution that is a propaganda tool for the Cuban regime and that is directly affecting their national security?” The “evidence” is Ukraine’s claim, raised at the UN on October 20, that more than 1,000 Cubans signed contracts with the Russian military between 2023 and 2025, making them one of the four largest foreign contingents in Moscow’s ranks. Waltz added the newer charge, the one he carried into the briefing: that the fighters’ pay was going to Havana instead of to them.

That is the language of a whip count, not a war-crimes docket. PassBlue, the independent outlet covering the UN, reported that Waltz spent last week meeting about a dozen Latin American envoys, from Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador and El Salvador, in an effort to persuade them to vote with the United States. The invitation-only “Cuba Libre” panel on Monday, with its dissident speakers and detention footage, was staged for the same purpose. Last year’s tally was 165 to 7, with 12 abstentions.

Ukraine, whose delegation supplied this week’s ammunition, voted no.

None of this is new. Washington ran the same charge at the October 2025 embargo debate, urging governments to oppose the resolution or abstain. The State Department’s 2026 Trafficking in Persons report, released October 8, repeated it with testimonies of Cubans lured by fake Russian job offers. Volodymyr Zelensky named Cuba in his September address to the General Assembly. And Amnesty International’s September report, built on interviews at Ukrainian POW camps between 2024 and 2026, documented the pipeline in detail: false civilian-job promises, coercion of foreigners already in Russia, men sent to the front with minimal training, and Cubans jailed in Russia on alleged drug charges who were offered military contracts as an alternative to their sentences.

What Washington has not produced is proof of the state’s role. The evidence, though, is thin. Waltz presented no supporting evidence for the wage allegation during his Monday remarks, according to NDTV’s account of the event. At the Foreign Press Center briefing afterward, a reporter from the independent outlet The Delegates Lounge pressed the American official on what evidence exists of systematic deception in the recruitment, and whether the blame sits with Havana or Moscow. The answer invoked President Trump’s efforts to end the war and warned against feeding more men into what he called the killing machine. Havana, for its part, issued the denial it has issued for three years: Cuba “is not a party to this conflict, nor does it participate with military personnel there or in any other country,” its Foreign Ministry said on October 22. The recruits acted without state consent and were recruited abroad, it said, pointing to the 17 arrests it made in September 2023 when it claimed to have dismantled a trafficking network.

In Havana on October 21, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez accused the State Department of spending months pressuring governments to flip their votes, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio doing it personally. He said Washington had threatened visa denials and sanctions against countries that side with Cuba. This year’s resolution is the first to name the fuel blockade Washington imposed in January and the “collective punishment” Havana says it inflicts; Rodríguez put the embargo’s six-decade cost at $178.7 billion. The backdrop is hard to ignore. On October 21, the day of his press conference, the national grid failed again. Reuters counted it as the third nationwide collapse this year and the eighth since October 2025. Havana blames the blockade for that too.

When Waltz walked out of Monday’s panel, Cuba’s ambassador Ernesto Soberón Guzmán and his group were waiting in the corridor, shouting “liar” and “terrorists” as he left toward the Delegates Entrance, PassBlue reported. Soberón called the American event a charade meant “to deviate attention from a simple fact: The US is acting as an international delinquent, enforcing collective punishment on the people of Cuba.” Waltz’s own posts run in a different register. “If you’re upset that we’re amplifying Cuban voices to discuss these issues, perhaps you should stop engaging in them,” he wrote on X. “Then we wouldn’t need to discuss them.”

Cuba’s UN mission is posting its vote-week updates under the hashtag #CubaNoEsUnaAmenaza: Cuba is not a threat.