Cuba says talks with Washington stalled, sanctions relief remains unlikely

Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla told reporters in Havana on June 30 that talks with Washington that restarted earlier this year had made no progress, dimming any near-term prospect of sanctions relief for an island already short of food, fuel, medicine and electricity. He said the negotiations were stalled and that U.S. pressure had shadowed them from the start.

Rodríguez said the talks showed “no progress” and argued that Washington’s approach had mixed respect in tone with threats, coercive measures and offensive language about Cuba’s sovereignty and independence. He said the hardship facing Cuba’s roughly 9 million residents had become so severe that the sanctions were not just an economic burden but a survival issue, saying they were “causing deaths” in Cuba.

Washington says Cuba’s government poses a national security threat and that sanctions are necessary to force political change. Havana says it poses no threat to the United States and insists on mutual respect and noninterference. Cuba approved a series of free-market reforms that Rodríguez said were not even discussed in the talks.

In May, the U.S. State Department sanctioned 11 Cuban regime-aligned actors and three entities, and in late May it designated Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., or GAESA, Cuba’s military-linked business conglomerate. In June, it added Unión Cuba-Petróleo, Cuba’s state-owned oil and gas company, to the sanctions list. The moves were aimed at addressing national security threats posed by the Cuban government.

On June 8, Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, said the expansion of sanctions was causing “widespread harm” in Cuba and said children were dying because doctors could not access essential medicines. A June 4 UN briefing said Cuba’s energy crisis had already postponed more than 100,000 surgeries and was disrupting water, sanitation, food production and healthcare.

Cuban officials plan to take the dispute back to the United Nations, including a General Assembly session scheduled for July 7 to denounce the tightening sanctions.