LatinNews Daily - 26 October 2026

Cuba: On 24 October Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, slammed the day-earlier call by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio for those in Cuba seeking “positive change” to “seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA [US Central Intelligence Agency].” He did not provide further details. The same day US President Donald Trump, whose administration has been carrying out a maximum pressure campaign on Cuba, aimed at forcing its political and economic opening, appeared to revive earlier threats of military action, saying at a rally: “We’ll take ​care of Cuba on our way back from Iran ... then we’re ​going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the ⁠deal”. Writing on social media, Fernández de Cossío said “now the US is resorting to public CIA recruitment campaigns. There must be a great deal of desperation or poverty within the agency’s ranks when it has to market its offers like toothpaste.” The latest ratcheting up of rhetoric comes as the US attorney general for Florida, James Uthmeier, recently issued an arrest warrant for Cuba’s former president Raúl Castro (2008-2018) over the deadly 1996 shootdown of aircraft operated by humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue, which killed three US citizens and one US national. Castro was charged by the US Department of Justice in May in relation to the incident. On 19 October, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel denounced the warrant as a “despicable action”, dismissing its legal and practical significance while the same day, the US ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Mike Waltz called it “justice long sought”. Waltz said accountability would be pursued at both state and federal levels and urged countries to reconsider support for the annual UN resolution against the US embargo, which has historically received overwhelming international support, and which is due to be voted upon on 28 October.