Cuba says its talks with the United States have stalled, with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez saying on Tuesday that the discussions are showing no progress. He said Havana will still stay open to dialogue, even as the latest round of contact appears to have run into the same wall that has long defined relations between the two countries.
The timing matters because Cuba is heading toward a July 7 debate at the United Nations General Assembly on Washington’s sanctions, a session Havana called for as pressure from the US keeps building. Rodriguez said the US Department of State has been pressuring and intimidating UN members not to take part, while describing the conduct of US delegations as marked by threats, coercive measures and offensive statements about Cuba’s independence.
The dispute is not new. The United States has maintained a total trade embargo on Cuba since the 1960s, and the annual UN vote on the issue has become a ritual of defiance for Havana. This year’s debate lands after a stretch of sharper pressure, including January threats of tariffs against any country that supplied Cuba with fuel and March confirmation that Cuban officials were in talks with the Trump administration.
Those talks have already produced one visible gesture. In April, the Cuban government pardoned 2,010 prisoners in what it called a humanitarian step, though the move did not include political dissidents jailed for crimes against authority. That detail now sits uneasily beside Rodriguez’s warning that the US campaign against Cuba is “already ongoing and intensifying.”
The gap between the two sides is what gives the next meeting its weight. Cuba is still signaling a willingness to talk, but Rodriguez’s account leaves little sign that the negotiations are moving anywhere. On July 7, the UN General Assembly debate will show whether Havana can rally enough backing to keep its campaign against US sanctions alive, or whether the pressure around Cuba’s isolation has become harder to resist.
