The United Nations General Assembly does not usually produce shouting matches at its own rostrum, but it produced one on Tuesday. Mike Waltz, the United States ambassador to the UN, was in the middle of his speech to the annual debate on Cuba's resolution against the American embargo when Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba's foreign minister, left his seat, came toward the podium and accused him of lying. Waltz did not step back. "Back up!" he shouted at the approaching minister. "This is America. This isn't Havana." Waltz raised his voice again: "He's not going to intimidate me in the United States of America, like he tries to intimidate political prisoners." UN officials moved in to restore order while delegates around them filmed the scene on their phones.
The speech that set it off was no routine defense of the embargo. Waltz used the American address to read out what he described as the Cuban regime's own wealth: the valuable real estate the regime holds in New York, a beach retreat at Varadero, and a black-and-white photograph of Fidel Castro wearing a Rolex watch — a watch Waltz priced, by his own math, at decades of an average Cuban worker's wages. He pointed at GAESA, the Cuban military's business empire, which he said sits on billions of dollars in hard currency while ordinary Cubans live with blackouts and empty shelves. It was as Waltz displayed the Castro photograph that the Cuban delegation demanded the speech be stopped.
On Cuba's account, Rodríguez's move was a formal protest: Havana says its foreign minister raised a point of order and called on the president of the General Assembly to bring the American ambassador to order over insults directed at the Cuban delegation. What the hall saw was less formal — a foreign minister on his feet, advancing on the podium mid-speech and shouting that Waltz was a liar, and an ambassador shouting back over him. Members of the Cuban delegation came forward with phones out, recording; American staff were filming too. Assembly officials moved between the two camps, order was restored, and the debate went on.
The ugliest claim concerns a phone. J.P. Freire, Waltz's spokesman, was recording the confrontation on his iPhone when, in video of the scene, another member of the Cuban delegation can be seen lunging toward Freire and apparently grabbing for the device. The man has not been identified, and what is known rests on that video: an apparent attempt to seize the phone of a staffer who was filming, in the middle of the scuffle. No UN statement on the incident had been issued as of Tuesday evening, and Cuba has not publicly answered the specific claim. What is confirmed is narrower than the word "assault" suggests — a grab for a phone, caught on camera.
Rodríguez answered Waltz twice over. In the hall, on Havana's account, he accused the United States of lying "in a crude and arrogant manner" and of disrespecting the dignity of member states, and he demanded that Americans be allowed to travel freely to Cuba. Afterwards he returned to the theme, saying Waltz's arrogance made him forget that "he is at the United Nations," not at the Security Council or in a Green Beret unit, and dismissing the American performance as a media circus. There was, he concluded, "no excuse to maintain the act of collective punishment" against the Cuban people.
Underneath the theatre sits the vote the Assembly has taken every year since 1992. Cuba's resolution calls for an end to the embargo the United States has maintained for more than sixty years, and it has passed by wide margins every time — though last year's majority narrowed sharply after an intensive American campaign, and Rodríguez has accused Washington of threatening countries that vote with Havana — a charge the State Department did not immediately answer when he made it last week. Waltz, for his part, has urged countries to vote the resolution down, calling it "an excuse to justify oppression, to justify the misery of the Cuban people." The vote is expected on Wednesday. It is non-binding: only the United States Congress can lift the embargo, whatever the Assembly decides.
For ordinary Cubans, none of this is abstract. The embargo — and the tightening oil pressure Washington has added this year — is daily life on the island: the price and scarcity of food and medicine, fuel shortages and blackouts. Havana calls that the collective punishment of a whole people. Washington's answer is that the misery is made in Havana, not in Washington — that a regime whose generals control the hotels, the shops and the remittances, and sit on billions while doing it, cannot blame an embargo for the shelves it keeps empty. Between those two claims stand eleven million people who live with the result either way. For Americans, the vote changes nothing directly — trade and travel stay as restricted as Washington keeps them. But the shouting is a measure of how personal the sixty-year feud has again become.
What remains unknown is considerable. The Cuban delegate in the phone video has not been named, and no investigation or formal complaint has been announced. Neither government has said whether the episode will draw a formal protest. Wednesday's vote will show whether Washington's pressure campaign moves any more countries than it did last year — the one number in this story that has not yet been shouted.
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