Havana's warning to Washington: a US military move would be an "atrocious crime", Cuban deputy FM says

A senior Cuban official has warned that any American military action against the island would amount to an "atrocious international crime", rejecting the US president's claim that Cuba is a broken state. Speaking on Sunday on C-SPAN's flagship current affairs programme, Washington Journal, Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said Havana would consider an attack an assault on a peaceful neighbouring state, and that his country reserves its right to defend itself.

The comments follow two interventions by Donald Trump in as many days. On Saturday, the US president was asked whether Washington might use the military in Cuba, and replied: "I don't think we'll need the military. Cuba is failing very badly." Earlier in the week, in his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Trump said that "freedom will be coming" to the Caribbean island. Remarks seen as an affront to Havana prompted the Cuban delegation to walk out of the assembly hall, a rare public rebuke of that kind on the UN stage.

Fernandez de Cossio directly pushed back on the premise of the American position. Addressing the idea that Washington could compel political change from Havana, he said that pressuring countries which refuse to "submit" — by disrupting their commercial shipments, seeking to handicap populations through hunger, cutting off reliable healthcare and withholding fuel — is "equivalent to a genocide". He noted that the United States has been doing this, in his words, "for nine months now".

That nine-month reference points to the sharpest escalation of the US economic campaign against Cuba in recent memory. Washington has pursued a policy of maximum economic pressure against the island for more than 60 years, a framework that has been tightened and loosened by successive administrations but never abandoned. The Trump administration has said publicly that it wants a shake-up in Havana's government, and has linked any prospect of talks to political change on the island.

Earlier this year, the administration enforced an additional oil and fuel blockade, a measure that officials in Havana says has damaged national infrastructure, produced widespread fuel shortages and triggered rolling power cuts. Cuban authorities have also pointed to systemic difficulties in securing food and other basic necessities for a country of more than 10 million people — shortages with immediate consequences for hospitals, transport, agriculture and household economies.

The dispute is therefore not only rhetorical. It runs over whether an economic campaign of this intensity crosses the line from pressure into coercion, and whether the resulting harm to civilians is deliberate enough to trigger legal and moral condemnation. Analysts of the US-Cuba relationship note that the core dispute has never really been about the existence of the embargo itself, which successive US administrations have defended, but about the scope, targeting and cumulative humanitarian effect of the measures attached to it.

That question is also framed in sharp legal terms. International law generally permits economic and political measures against another state, while reserving the use of armed force to cases of self-defence or authorisation by the Security Council. Where the argument now sits is less about whether Washington may restrict trade — a contested but recognisably grey area — and more about whether such restrictions, when aimed at starving a population, depriving it of fuel and destabilising an entire grid, can be characterised as collective punishment. The use of the word "genocide" is not a casual one, and it is not a term that Western governments have applied to their own Cuba policy.

Cuba's own framing has long rested on the principle of non-intervention, and Havana has repeatedly characterised the embargo as a form of economic aggression amounting to war. Fernandez de Cossio said his country must now prepare its citizens for the possibility of US military aggression, while conceding that Cuba may end up standing alone. Even so, he said, Havana will exercise what it considers its legitimate right to self-defence.

The official pointed to diplomatic channels that remain formally open between the two governments, but argued they have produced little because of what he called the economic stranglehold of continuing sanctions. He said Cuba is nonetheless prepared to deal with Washington in a "respectful manner" — provided discussions accommodate mutual dignity, serve the interests of both populations and respect the principle of state sovereignty.

That conditional offer sets out the two sides of the argument. From Havana's perspective, ending the economic pressure is a precondition for meaningful engagement. From Washington's, the article's reporting indicates, substantive talks are on offer only if the Cuban government changes. Each side is effectively waiting for the other to move first, a standoff that observers of the island say has hardened public sentiment on both sides of the Florida Straits.

Washington is not alone in its pressure campaign, but it is increasingly isolated over it. Several countries condemned the continued US sanctions and blockade of Cuba during the General Assembly meeting earlier this week, with the debate at the UN exposing a widening gap between Washington's posture toward Havana and the positions of much of the global south.

The stakes extend well beyond the diplomatic register. For ordinary Cubans, sanctions translate into hours without electricity, longer queues for fuel, deteriorating hospital supplies and fewer imported goods. Those pressures have also accelerated outward migration from the island, adding a human dimension that officials in Havana say underscores the cost of the campaign described by Fernandez de Cossio as near-genocidal.

For now, the confrontation remains at the level of words, but the vocabulary has hardened. A president who suggests a military option is no longer a hypothetical, and a foreign ministry answering with the language of international crime signals that Havana is preparing both its defences and its case to the world. The photograph outside Havana's Little Havana district in Miami — a raised fist painted in the colours of the Cuban flag by Cuban-born artist Julio Cesar — captures the mood of a community that has heard this kind of talk before, and is watching closely to see whether it becomes anything more than rhetoric.