U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said Sunday that he believes “the Cuban people will see freedom on President Trump’s watch,” as he described a confrontation with Cuban diplomats at the United Nations General Assembly and the expulsion of a Cuban diplomat from the United States.
“Look, I think the Cuban people will see freedom on President Trump’s watch, and I’ll just leave it at that,” Waltz said on Fox News’ Sunday Briefing on Nov. 1. He tied unrest he blamed on Cuban influence in the United States to “67 years of putting up with Havana.” Fox News Digital reported that in the same exchange Waltz said the Cuban government “has been exporting communism, their Marxist ideology, through leftist groups and current politicians right here in the United States.”
Host Peter Doocy asked Waltz about the United States expelling a Cuban diplomat after an approach in New York. Waltz said the expulsion order came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “To be clear, that was Secretary Rubio’s order to boot the guy,” Waltz said on the Sunday Briefing segment. “The guy that we actually put on a one-way flight back to his crumbling country shoved one of my staff, slapped the phone out of his hand, was trying to bully the UN staff into cutting my microphone. Then their foreign minister gets up out of his chair and rushes the podium.”
“If they’ll do that on the floor of the UN, in front of diplomats, in front of the world, imagine what they do to these the poor Cuban people behind closed doors,” Waltz said, in wording also carried by Fox News Digital. He said he is a “27-year Green Beret,” that “they mess with the wrong diplomat,” and that he “really thought it was about to go down.” What angered the Cuban side, he said, was that he held up photos of “Castro’s private island, his luxury jet, the Rolex that the current regime wears around the world, the luxury vacations, the yachts,” arguing that “the elites are living lives of luxury while their people starve.”
“They use the UN, they try to use it to further their propaganda and blame us. We’re not going to have it, and we smacked it down, almost literally,” Waltz said. Asked whether he wished he had taken two more steps toward a physical confrontation, he answered, “I’m a diplomat, Peter. Let’s use words, not bullets. If they’re going to go there, then that’s what we’ll do.”
Days earlier, Waltz had posted from the UN after the General Assembly vote on the U.S. embargo. “The corrupt Cuban regime is holding 800 political prisoners in brutal conditions,” he wrote in an Oct. 28 post, thanking dissidents José Daniel Ferrer and Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat. In another post the same day he said that under President Trump and Rubio, “we have turned the tables on this Communist dictatorship,” calling the approach the “Donroe Doctrine in action,” in a follow-up post. Rapid Response 47 posted Waltz saying, “Under @POTUS’s leadership, we will not allow [the United Nations] to be a mechanism for propaganda,” in a White House rapid-response video.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla answered the U.S. presentation at the General Assembly directly on his own account. “El gobierno de EEUU miente de forma grosera y permanente en la Asamblea General,” he wrote Oct. 27, accusing Washington’s permanent representative of arrogance and saying U.S. statements were a “nuevo intento desesperado por justificar la agresión económica contra Cuba y su criminal cerco energético,” in a full-length post. After the Assembly vote, he wrote that the body had voted “mayoritariamente contra el bloqueo de EEUU contra Cuba” and that Washington remained isolated in what he called collective punishment, in a victory post. On Oct. 28 he said he had denounced a U.S. “guerra económica” aimed at “cambio de régimen,” including a fuel blockade he equated with a naval blockade, in another Assembly post.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, in the days around the UN vote, repeated the government’s blockade framing. After a hospital visit he wrote that staff were confronting the “BloqueoGenocida” and that “#CubaNoEsUnaAmenaza, el bloqueo sí,” in an Oct. 31 post. Presidencia Cuba marked the UN outcome as recognition of Cuban “victoria,” via a presidency account post.
Waltz pointed viewers to Rubio’s State Department report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” which Fox News Digital said runs about 100 pages and alleges Cuban espionage and influence operations. Cuba remains on the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list, designated Jan. 12, 2021, alongside Iran and North Korea, according to the State Department’s state sponsors page. U.S. policy under Trump and Rubio has maintained the embargo that the General Assembly again opposed.
Waltz’s Sunday forecast that Cubans will “see freedom on President Trump’s watch” is his prediction, offered as he described a UN floor clash, a staff shove, a microphone fight, Rodríguez rushing the podium, and Rubio’s expulsion order. Rodríguez calls the U.S. case at the UN a lie and the embargo collective punishment. Díaz-Canel frames daily governance as resistance to the blockade. The General Assembly vote, the ambassador’s posts on political prisoners, and Cuba’s place on the state sponsors list are the public records around that exchange; whether Cuba’s political system changes on Trump’s watch remains Waltz’s forecast, not a completed outcome.