--- title: "Cuba Says US Military Force Would Be an ‘Atrocious International Crime’" description: "Deputy foreign minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio calls the sanctions regime ‘equivalent to a genocide’ after Trump’s week of threats" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-09-27T20:34:09Z modified: 2026-09-28T02:11:56Z url: https://rews.cc/a/cuba-says-us-military-force-would-be-an-atrocious-internatio-f0305a language: en tags: ["cuba", "trump", "sanctions", "un", "military", "world"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Cuba Says US Military Force Would Be an ‘Atrocious International Crime’ *Deputy foreign minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio calls the sanctions regime ‘equivalent to a genocide’ after Trump’s week of threats* By Nate Ledger · September 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/cuba-says-us-military-force-would-be-an-atrocious-internatio-f0305a ## In brief - Cuba’s deputy foreign minister said US military force against the island would be ‘an atrocious international crime’ - The warning followed Trump’s UNGA remark that ‘freedom will be coming’ to Cuba and his comment that Cuba is ‘failing very badly’ - Fernandez de Cossio called nine months of US fuel blockade and six decades of sanctions ‘equivalent to a genocide’ - He said diplomatic channels remain open but have yielded minimal results, and Cuba would engage only on terms of mutual dignity and sovereignty - Several countries condemned the US sanctions and blockade of Cuba during the UN General Assembly The sequence over the past week went like this. On Tuesday, at the United Nations General Assembly, President Donald Trump said that “freedom will be coming” to Cuba, and the Cuban delegation walked out of the hall. On Saturday, asked about military action, Trump told reporters: “I don’t think we’ll need the military. Cuba is failing very badly.” And on Sunday, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, went on C-SPAN’s *Washington Journal* — an American call-in show, which is itself a choice — to say that any US military action against the island would be “an atrocious international crime for the US to use military force against Cuba, which is a peaceful neighbouring country.” When a government’s senior diplomat goes on foreign television to pre-register a war-crimes objection, you can read it two ways. The alarmed reading is that Havana genuinely considers military action plausible enough to build a public record against it. The other reading is that the statement is itself the policy: Fernandez de Cossio said Cuba must ready its citizens for possible US aggression and that, while it recognizes it might stand alone, it will exercise its legitimate right to self-defence. That is deterrence by press appearance, which tells you something about the deterrence available by other means. His larger argument was about the sanctions. The United States has maintained maximum economic pressure on Cuba for more than six decades, and earlier this year the Trump administration added an oil and fuel blockade that has crippled the island’s infrastructure — widespread fuel scarcity, rolling power outages, and, according to Cuban officials, systemic difficulty securing food and basic necessities for a country of more than 10 million people. Fernandez de Cossio’s word for coercing nations that do not “submit” — disrupting commercial shipments, starving a population, withholding fuel, as the US has, in his words, “done for nine months now” — was “equivalent to a genocide.” It is an extraordinarily loaded term, and he used it on American television, aimed at an American audience, presumably knowing exactly how it would land. The blockade and the rhetoric are connected in Havana’s telling. Trump’s position — that he will not need the military because Cuba is “failing very badly” — is an explicit bet that economic pressure does the work of force, and that the failure of the Cuban state is the mechanism and the evidence at once. Havana’s counter is that the failure is manufactured in Washington, which is why officials there keep insisting on the causal chain: blockade, scarcity, collapse, capitulation. Bruno Rodriguez, Cuba’s foreign minister, [made a version of the same case at the UN](https://rews.cc/a/cuba-calls-the-us-oil-blockade-collective-punishment-while-t-d8275d) last week, calling the oil blockade collective punishment, while Trump mused about a deal. On the diplomatic track, Fernandez de Cossio said bilateral channels with Washington remain open but have yielded minimal results under the weight of the sanctions, and that Havana is willing to engage in a “respectful manner” — conditioned on mutual dignity, benefit to both populations, and respect for sovereignty. Open channels with minimal results is, historically, a fairly stable description of US-Cuba relations, through administrations of both parties and sixty-plus years of embargo. Several countries used their UNGA speaking slots this week to condemn the continued sanctions and blockade, a ritual that recurs annually and changes very little. So the week leaves things roughly here: the president says he probably will not need the military because the pressure is working; the Cuban government says the pressure is a genocide and that it is preparing its people for the possibility he is wrong. Both of those statements are addressed as much to domestic and third-country audiences as to each other. The odd venue for the sharpest line — a Sunday morning call-in show on C-SPAN — suggests Havana thinks its best available leverage is American public opinion, which is either shrewd or a measure of how little leverage is left.