GENEVA - UN human rights experts* today condemned recent measures by the United States against Cuba, denouncing them as an attempt to alter the constitutional order of a sovereign State through threats and coercion.
They urged the international community and civil society to act swiftly to prevent a "silent Gaza" from unfolding on the island, as recently invoked by four members of the US Congress during their visit to Cuba.
The US has expanded unilateral sanctions targeting key sectors of the Cuban economy since June 2026. The latest sanctions announced on 23 July, include energy companies, which has further blocked fuel procurements, even for humanitarian reasons, at a time when Cuba is facing acute fuel shortages and has recently experienced its third major nationwide blackout. Energy, transport, irrigation and basic services are failing simultaneously, disproportionately affecting women, children, older persons and other vulnerable groups, including peasant farmers in the rural economy.
"The humanitarian consequences are already unfolding into a full-blown crisis, threatening the rights to health, to life, to food and to development," the experts said, following reports that uncollected waste is accumulating in parts of Havana, deepening the serious risk of diseases spreading.
UN agencies in Cuba have warned of mounting risks of food insecurity and shortages of medicines and basic necessities, with repeated national grid collapses and prolonged blackouts disrupting health care services and causing critical shortages of medicines and cancer-treatment capacity.
"Food must never be used as an instrument of political pressure. 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 said.
On 20 July, the US State Department released a report entitled "Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism" describing Cuba as a multifaceted threat to US national security and hemispheric stability, deploring its lack of concrete evidence that Cuba supports terrorism or subversive activities.
The experts stressed that the US's unlawful unilateral coercive measures against Cuba contravene Article 2 of the UN Charter, and form part of a broader regime-change strategy encompassing the decades-long embargo on Cuba.
"The US 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," said the experts
"The Security Council and General Assembly should urgently address these threats as a matter of international peace and security," they added.
