INDEPENDENT UN human rights experts on Thursday condemned a fresh round of United States (US) sanctions against Cuba, calling them an attempt to force change on “a sovereign State through threats and coercion.”
The Human Rights Council–appointed group of experts warned that without swift action from the international community and civil society, Cuba risk becoming a “silent Gaza”.
The comparison was recently drawn by four members of the U.S. Congress during a visit to the island in July.
Washington has widened unilateral sanctions on key sectors of the Cuban economy since June 2026.
The U.S. took measures to block oil supplies from entering the country in January, after cutting off shipments from Venezuela, which had previously been a key exporter to Cuba.
The latest measures, announced July 23, target energy companies and have further choked off fuel imports – even for humanitarian purposes.
This is just as Cuba grapples with severe fuel shortages and a third major nationwide blackout.
Energy, transport, irrigation and basic services are breaking down at once, the experts said, hitting women, children, older people and rural farmers hardest.
“The humanitarian consequences are already unfolding into a full-blown crisis, threatening the rights to health, to life, to food and to development,” they said.
They also point to reports of uncollected waste piling up in parts of Havana and raising the risk of disease outbreaks.
UN agencies in Cuba have flagged growing food insecurity and shortages of medicines and basic supplies.
This follows repeated grid failures and blackouts disrupt health care and leave hospitals short of medicine and cancer treatment capacity.
“Food must never be used as an instrument of political pressure,” the independent experts said – who not work for the UN and receive no salary for their work.
“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 experts outlined that on 20 July, the US State Department released a report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism, describing the one-party State as a multifaceted threat to US national security and regional stability.
The experts said the report offers no concrete evidence that Cuba supports terrorism or subversion.
They also voiced concern that political and ideological motives – not security ones – appear to be driving the continued pressure.
The measures, they said, breach Article 2 of the UN Charter and form part of a broader regime-change strategy that also encompasses the decades -old U.s embargo on Cuba.
“The U.S. 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 independent experts said.
They, however, called on the UN Security Council and General Assembly to treat the situation as an urgent matter of international peace and security. (NAN)
