By Ike Nahem
Submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur
Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth. And any time anyone violates your human rights, you can take them to the world court. Malcolm X
From November 11-21, 2025 the “Special Rapporteur on human rights and unilateral coercive measures,” representing the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), will visit the Republic of Cuba. The Special Rapporteur (SR) has called for international input and submissions in conjunction with the trip.
The request for input and commentary from the HRC SR is accompanied by numerous detailed questions that pose how the “imposition of unilateral sanctions” and “unilateral coercive measures” affect human rights in Cuba overall and in areas such as employment, health care, education, social protections for the disabled and elderly, infrastructure, energy, immigration, labor rights, and on business owners.
In its call for input the Special Rapporteur stated, “The visit will examine, in a spirit of co-operation and dialogue, whether and to what extent the adoption, maintenance or implementation of unilateral sanctions, means of their enforcement and over-compliance impedes the full realization of the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments, including the right of individuals and peoples to development.”
This submission is from the perspective of opponents of the US extraterritorial embargo-blockade inside the United States. The Cuba solidarity and anti-blockade forces in the United States have undergone political and organizational growth for several years now, in a period where the US economic and political war against Cuba has deepened, with accumulated damage. (We have mobilized to get anti-embargo, pro-US-Cuba Normalization Resolutions passed in over 100 city councils (in cities large and small), state legislatures, and other elected bodies, and labor union organizations.
Our growing movement has seen the devastation of the US “unilateral coercive measures” firsthand.
We have raised large sums and delivered solidarity humanitarian aid to our Cuban sisters and brothers for many years. But we know it is but a drop in the bucket. Cuban patients are dying and suffering because of how the US “unilateral coercive measures” and imposition of unilateral sanctions” prevent Cuban hospitals and doctors from purchasing parts and equipment, as well as medications.
We have seen the shortages and long lines for basic commodities; the near-collapse of the dilapidated energy grid with regular loss of power altogether in homes and neighborhoods, as the blockade suppresses Cuba’s access to capital, industrial parts, and inputs to upgrade and modernize its industrial infrastructure.
We have seen the impact of mass emigration from skilled professionals on Cuba’s excellent medical and education systems and structures. We have seen the impact of US “unilateral coercive measures” – which were maintained and deepened under the Joseph Biden Administration even during the COVID-19 pandemic! as Cuba was sending direct medical aid to many countries and developing highly efficacious COVID vaccines — on Cuban tourism and the businesses and workers in that crucial Cuban foreign exchange earner.
In short, there is no question, and ample documentation that will no doubt be further documented by the Special Rapporteur regarding the purposeful harm that flows directly out of the US economic and political war on Cuba.
Every year the United Nations, in supplemental reports that accompany the annual vote against US anti-Cuban extraterritorial sanctions in the UN General Assembly (GA), documents this thoroughly. After all, every year the UN GA votes to condemn the US extraterritorial embargo. This writer, who lives in New York City, has regularly attended, with dozens of other anti-blockade activists, the UN GA votes every Fall, including the most recent on October 28-29, 2025. We witnessed speaker after speaker — Ambassadors and top diplomats all – from across the globe document how the US extraterritorial sanctions impacts Cuban life. This submission aims more to focus on how “human rights” has been used as a club against Cuba.
Human rights – to have any real meaning – has to incorporate both social and political freedom. But history is replete with examples of how revolutionary and progressive movements inevitably produce fierce and violent resistance from threatened and overturned social systems and classes.
In the 20th Century there were regular US military interventions to prevent and crush progressive, democratic, social change in the Central America, the Caribbean, and the South American continent. These interventions had nothing to do with “human rights” and “democracy”, but rather for the extraction of profit and so-called raw materials for US capital.
This has resulted in a shameful legacy leaving a trail of the most odious military and family dictatorships under US provenance across the Americas. Cuba is perhaps the textbook example of this history. That is, until the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and its continuity from 1959 to the present day.
The Fulgencio Batista military-police dictatorship – which overthrew the extant democratic Constitution of 1940 — was backed and armed by Washington to the very end. The transition from the Dwight Eisenhower to John Kennedy White Houses carried over with it the hapless CIA-organized mercenary invasion of revolutionary Cuba in April 1961.
The burned Kennedy Administration was not prepared — right as the CIA operation was being exposed and decisively defeated at Playa Giron-Bay of Pigs — to deploy the US naval and ground forces directly in Cuba to salvage their defeated mercenaries. So, under the circumstances, Kennedy’s team was forced to accept the defeat and political humiliation. But Kennedy almost immediately shifted to a policy of unbridled terrorism, assassinations, sabotage, and subversion, labeled Operation Mongoose, against Cuba. Mongoose’s depredations led to thousands of deaths and significant economic damage on the island. The Cuban Revolution defended itself magnificently and humanely in those years of direct siege. Sophists can choose to lie about torture and extrajudicial executions in Cuba during that period to the present day. But this is generally what psychologists call projection.
In any case the Kennedy Administration realized that mercenaries representing the hated, overthrown, US-backed Cuban oligarchy of comprador capitalists, large landowners, and US-based organized crime families, would never have the base of popular support to overthrow the Fidel Castro-led government. The Cuban Revolution was too popular, and the Cuban working people and youth saw themselves as not only beneficiaries but participants and activists in the revolutionary transformations. Those transformations in this period included the eradication of legal anti-Black racism and segregation; the amazing elevation of Cuban women; the elimination of illiteracy, and the establishment of universal, free medical and education access.
Therefore, the Kennedy Administration saw Operation Mongoose as a softening-up period to create the political conditions for an actual, direct US invasion of the island. What became the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis developed in the year-and-a-half that followed Washington’s Bay of Pigs fiasco.
As US invasion plans and terrorist actions deepened, the Cuban revolutionary government turned to the then-Soviet Union for economic and military support. Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev convinced a reluctant Cuban leadership to all the installation nuclear weapons on the island as a deterrence to the US invasion everyone knew was coming. For Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership the installation –which they insisted should be secret over Fidel Castro’s ignored objections – was also a bargaining chip over US nuclear missiles targeting the Soviet Union based in adjacent Turkey, and overall negotiations over nuclear testing, weapons production, and deployments. The Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba (and later, more discretely, the US ones in Turkey), as part of a deal that excluded Cuba. The US blockade deepened while direct US invasion was no longer “on the table”. In this optimum period of US economic and political domination across the Americas, every South American, Central American, and Caribbean government — with the exception of Mexico – severed diplomatic relations and economic exchanges with Cuba. Canada also maintained normal relations with Cuba.
This seemingly ancient history is the origins of what is now a 65-year-old policy of US sanctions and aggression. It is impossible to have a serious discussion about questions of human rights, democratic rights and space, or “repression” in Cuba if your starting premise is not the fact and actuality of the longstanding, bipartisan (that is, across Republican and Democratic White Houses and Congresses) aggression and bellicosity of the United States government against Cuba. That is why making the direct connection between “unilateral coercive measures” and the “imposition of unilateral sanctions” and questions of human rights in Cuba made by the HRC SR is important. Cuba has the right to defend itself against “unilateral coercive measures” that purposely aim to create harm, suffering, and economic sabotage.
Successive bipartisan US White Houses and Congresses have presumed upon themselves the right to effectuate “regime change” against the Cuban government and destroy its socialist revolution. (In the face of US subversion and violence from 1959-62, Cuba became a predominately non-capitalist planned economy with a monopoly of foreign trade, and with public enterprises that are decisive in an overall economic terrain.)
The bipartisan blockade deepened under the first Donald Trump Administration (2016-20) after a brief shift towards normalization towards the end of Barack Obama’s second term in 2014-15. That brief period also saw private businesses and brands expand in Cuba.
Trump’s policies were continued – even under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic! — under the Joseph Biden Administration (2020-24). Now under the direction of Donald Trump-Marco Rubio White House and State Department US bellicosity and bombast has escalated further.
The SR visit follows the October 29, 2025 vote in the United Nations General Assembly – for the 31st consecutive year – against US anti-Cuba policy. This year’s vote saw more openly aggressive Trump Administration lobbying among UN member-states to vote with the US or at least abstain. And Trump-Rubio did register small, but noteworthy, steps in that regard compared to previous years.
The final vote for the Cuban-sponsored Resolution on the “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial, and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba” was: Yes 165; No 7; Abstentions 12.
For several years previous, only Israel voted with the US against the Cuban-sponsored Resolution. This year five new No votes were gained by Washington in addition to Israel: Argentina, Hungary, North Macedonia, Paraguay, and Ukraine. Abstaining votes included Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Costa Rico, Czechia, Ecuador, Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco, and Romania.
The European Union was split. In previous years, in a separate united statement the EU voted unanimously as a bloc against US policy. This year Czechia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania abstained while the remaining 21 voted Yes.
The 2025 vote also registered growing social and political polarization in the Americas and growing US political, economic, and military threats and pressures. Argentina under the crisis-ridden Javier Milei Administration voted No along with Paraguay, while conservative governments in Costa Rico and Ecuador abstained.
As this submission is being prepared, Washington under Trump-Rubio direction is carrying out clear military escalation and buildup of naval forces in the Caribbean that aims at Venezuela and Colombia, under the spurious banner of drug interdiction.
This is the context for the upcoming Special Rapporteur visit to Cuba.
Cuba’s political system, human rights practice, and democratic space is continually subjected to malevolent attacks by conservative and liberal US political leaders and corporate media as a justification or rationalization for US anti-blockade policies. But it is absurd to the point of obscene to downplay decades of US intervention, attempts at economic isolation and blockade, and aggression against Cuba in discussing the question of human rights and “democracy” in Cuba. The historical record of US aggression is no secret anywhere in the world, including in the United States. This actual record frankly makes Cuba’s real achievements in human rights, including in the political space, rights, liberties, and mass participation for all Cuban citizens in decision making, and how that has expanded, nothing less than astonishing. Cuba is certainly not a capitalist parliamentary democracy, where formal “democratic” institutions and mechanisms are under increasing pressures and encroachments under conditions of economic crisis, grotesque social inequality, and the domination of big money and private media oligopolies. Cuba’s highly participatory political system unfolded and has developed institutionally under the conditions of the extreme pressure of the US blockade.
There have been many billions of dollars in damage and sabotage against the Cuban economy from US attempts to seal the island in an economic blockade. Every year the US governments spends tens of millions of dollars openly – and who knows how much covertly in projects kept “secret” by US legislation (although they are regularly exposed by the Cuban government and then collapse).
It is clear that the only possible road to the further opening of political space for the pro-capitalist political forces and tendencies in Cuba who look to the United States government for inspiration and support, would be for bipartisan Washington to establish normal relations with Cuba. Normal relations can only mean: 1) the ending of all economic, commercial, financial and travel sanctions by the US against the Cuban state; 2) the removal of Cuba from the bogus and insulting US State Department “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list; 3) the withdrawal and return of the illegally occupied territory of Guantanamo Bay to Cuba; and 3) the end of all “regime change” programs directed at the sovereign Cuban government by US government agencies.
It is, of course, the very aggressive, interventionist, and violent policies – crowned by an economic war aimed at asphyxiation – that makes it necessary for Cuba to be vigilant and defend itself by any means necessary in the famous formulation of the US freedom fighter and great defender of Cuba, Malcolm X. (This is the Centenary of Malcolm X’s birth). These politically and morally justified measures are then labeled “repression” and used to rationalize, speciously, the US economic and political war.
In a 2017 Submission to United Nations Human Rights Commission, Geneva, Switzerland entitled “The Case of Cuba: “Human Rights” as a Club which took up these questions
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/the-case-of-cuba-human-rights-as-a-club/
I wrote,
“Perhaps a lesson from US history would be useful here. There are defenders of the Southern slaveocracy, the “Confederacy,” and even some who claim the mantle of civil liberties, that criticize President Abraham Lincoln for restrictions and censorship of pro-slavery and pro-Confederate newspapers and suspending habeas corpus protections for suspected pro-Confederate agents and sympathizers. At the very time these forces were engaged in a war to defend the maintenance and expansion of slavery in the United States. As the Civil War unfolded by 1863-64 it was becoming a revolutionary war – especially with the infusion of some 200,000 African-American troops in the US Army and Navy – to abolish slavery. You can be sure that the Confederate Agents and their apologists had their political space and access to legal media completely evaporated by the government and people of the United States as the war radicalized. We should also recall that it was during the period of Radical Reconstruction under President Ulysses Grant and the Radical Republican domination of the US Congress, that the greatest advances in the rights of Black former slaves (as well as masses of poor white farmers) and democratic rights for the vast majority were enforced by the occupation of the United States Army and the repression of the social and political power of the former ruling slave-owning planter class. The end of that “repression” after 1876 and the withdrawal of US Army from the ex-Confederate states brought back unfettered white supremacy, the rise of white terrorist outfits like the KKK, and a body blow to democratic rights, political space, workers rights, and liberty that extended for many decades. It was a curse on the United States which only began to be lifted by the heroic mass struggles of Black working people and their allies in the 1950s and 1960s to overturn the Jim Crown system in the South and across the entire US – at least legally.”
As long as the United States government is engaged in an open policy of subversion and the funding of clients promoting a policy of overturning the sovereign and socialist Cuban government (which could only mean returning Cuba to the status of a dependent US semi-colony) then it would be extremely naïve to expect the Cuban government and people to not be vigilant and defend themselves.
Defeating this policy of “unilateral coercive measures” and the “imposition of unilateral sanctions” is the precondition for the full enjoyment of human and democratic space and liberties not only for the struggling and fighting Cuban people. It will also be a huge advance for the human and democratic rights of the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity.
Ike Nahem
For the Cuba Si NY/NJ Coalition