Days ago, President Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that Cuba is a failed state whose system will fall, prompting the Cuban delegation to walk out. Hours later, on September 23, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington is open to discussing a transition to new leadership and ending the embargo on the island. Their public salvos were nothing new; what mattered was the sequence in which they came, and the little attention given to the country’s ongoing crisis and the suffering of its citizens.
Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla answered from the same podium on Saturday, calling the embargo and the energy squeeze a ruthless siege and an act of collective punishment, and saying Havana remains open to dialogue. The same day, Trump said that the two countries would reach a deal and that he doubted military action would be needed. Neither has said what a deal would contain.
Each camp claims to speak for a Cuban public that has rarely been asked what it wants. Meanwhile, the island is enduring its biggest economic crisis since independence, as crippling fuel shortages overlap with a historic collapse of an already derelict public infrastructure.
The hemisphere has spent this year choosing sides: Ecuador moved to sever ties with Havana in March, declaring the Cuban ambassador “persona non grata.” The same month, Costa Rica closed its embassy and expelled Cuban diplomats. When Cuba forced the General Assembly to reopen the embargo debate in July, the procedural motion passed 136 to 9, with 30 abstentions, and Argentina, Costa Rica and Paraguay voting no alongside the U.S. This showed that Cuba had lost support since last October, when a more substantive resolution earned 165 votes.
A vote next month on another more serious resolution will be a better measure of Cuba’s backing. This is why the State Department is weighing strict controls on the Cuban officials who plan to attend. Yet Cubans’ views have been largely absent from this year’s diplomatic confrontation.
Key issues
This summer, the Vanderbilt University’s LAPOP Lab’s AmericasBarometer surveyed 1,095 internet-connected Cubans about their views on the country’s outlook. The report’s authors acknowledge that the sample is not nationally representative and leans younger and more urban than the island, though it is the most systematic record of Cuban opinion in decades. AQ has already reported its headline result: Three in four respondents blame their own government for the island’s ongoing crisis. Its less-noticed findings matter more for the diplomacy on display in New York, because they describe a political order neither camp at the UN is equipped to address.
How much weight does sovereignty carry with the people Havana claims to defend? Asked to name the best option for Cuba’s institutional future, 34% chose an independent republic, 30% a status like Puerto Rico’s, and 29% annexation. In a separate binary choice, 73% preferred economic development with foreign involvement over national independence free of it. (The questions can be found in the study’s questionnaire.)
The question offered options no Cuban government has put before voters, but its findings are still significant. A state that has rested its legitimacy on defending the nation against Washington seems to have lost a large share of its citizens on that issue.
Rubio’s condition—a transition to new leadership—is what respondents rank second. Asked whether the country should make economic changes as soon as possible or fix its institutions first, 77% chose economic change, and 69% chose economic recovery over a political opening. Even among those who blame Havana for the crisis, two-thirds still want recovery first, and the survey’s authors read the result the same way: Respondents care about political reform, but they want the basics of daily life restored first. In the month before the survey, 86% lost electricity every day, and on September 18 the national grid again collapsed.
The finding with the largest consequences for the diplomacy in New York concerns who governs. Asked who makes the most important decisions in Cuba today, 46% named the Castro family. About one in six named the Communist Party, and 14% named Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has been head of state since 2018 and party leader since Raúl Castro stepped down in 2021. Asked who benefits from the government’s economic measures, 31% pointed to firms and people tied to the state, while 4% said ordinary Cubans.
International and internal views
Those answers describe something close to what Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan called “sultanistic rule” in their foundational book Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. In this kind of system, power runs through a ruling family and its clients more than through the institutions that formally hold it. The label fits Cuba only in part, since the party and the armed forces are far stronger than in the classic cases, but it captures how a plurality of connected Cubans see their country, and it exposes a blind spot in both camps.
Washington and its partners demand elections that a government would have to concede, and Havana’s defenders protect state sovereignty, while respondents believe power lies in a family whose most influential members hold no executive office. Recognition, rupture and embargo votes are built for dealing with governments, and they reach the Castros only indirectly. Raúl Castro is 95, and if respondents are right about where power sits, his death would leave in place both the family and the state-linked firms that 31% name as the main beneficiaries of the government’s economic measures.
The survey suggests that both camps at the UN are arguing about the wrong Cuba. Havana’s defenders are protecting a sovereignty that barely a third of internet-connected Cubans would choose, on behalf of a state that a plurality sees as run by a family. Meanwhile, Washington’s partners are demanding elections from a government that fewer than a third of respondents see as the real center of power, for people who want the lights back on first.
The U.N. Assembly has called for an end to the embargo every year since 1992, in a non-binding resolution that passed 187 to 2 in 2024 and 165 to 7 last October. Argentina and Paraguay voted no, and Costa Rica and Ecuador abstained. This month’s resolution on this issue will record where governments stand on Cuban sovereignty and Cuban freedom now, yet the Cubans surveyed this summer put two other matters at the center of their answers: a family they see holding power without holding office, and a grid that fails most of them every day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orlando J. Pérez
Reading Time: 4 minutesPérez is a professor of political science at the University of North Texas at Dallas. He is the author of Civil-Military Relations in Post-Conflict Societies: Transforming the Role of the Military in Central America.
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