标签： Dominica

Decades of diplomatic and economic estrangement between Cuba and the United States are set to return to the center of the global stage next week, after Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez confirmed that Havana has officially submitted a request for a special United Nations General Assembly session on July 7 to confront the long-standing U.S. embargo against the Caribbean island.

Speaking at a formal press conference, Rodríguez laid out Havana’s core objective for the upcoming session: to force the international community to confront the crippling humanitarian toll that the 60-plus-year U.S. restrictive policy has inflicted on the Cuban people, the Cuban Embassy noted in an official press statement released after the event.

Beyond laying out the harms of the embargo, Rodríguez issued a sharp rebuke of the United States, accusing the Biden administration of launching a coordinated, global diplomatic pressure campaign to derail the upcoming debate entirely. The Cuban foreign minister argued that U.S. officials have leveraged threats, blackmail, and diplomatic coercion to pressure other UN member states to oppose the special session and boycott its proceedings.

According to Rodríguez, the cumulative damage of the U.S. sanctions regime has steadily worsened for Cuban civilians, with impacts felt in every sector of daily life across the island. He rejected long-standing U.S. justifications for the embargo, labeling the United States’ multi-faceted campaign of hostility against Cuba not as a defensive measure, but “a crime against humanity in full swing.”

He went further in his condemnation, calling the targeted U.S. energy embargo and associated restrictive measures an act of genocide that amounts to collective punishment. These policies, he insisted, systematically violate the fundamental human rights of all Cubans and directly contravene established international humanitarian law.

Rodríguez also pushed back against the core narrative the U.S. has relied on to maintain the embargo for decades, noting that Cuba, a small island nation, poses no credible security threat to the United States – the world’s largest military and nuclear power. “The blockade and the policy of aggression and hostility of the United States government against Cuba is a threat to the existence and well-being of the Cuban people, and to the exercise of their human rights,” he emphasized.

Looking ahead to the July 7 vote and debate, Rodríguez pointed to three decades of precedent to justify his expectation of broad international support. The UN General Assembly has passed resolutions condemning the U.S. embargo 31 consecutive times, with each resolution winning overwhelming backing from the body’s 193 member states. That track record, he argued, demonstrates that the global community widely rejects the U.S. policy as a violation of international norms.

Even so, Rodríguez detailed the extent of the U.S. campaign to stop the session. He alleged that the U.S. Permanent Mission to the UN in New York has threatened to pursue legal action to block the General Assembly from convening and deliberating on the embargo issue. He added that the U.S. State Department has mobilized its entire global diplomatic network to suppress discussion of the embargo, an attempt to censor Cuba’s right to raise a matter that directly impacts international peace and security and the survival of an entire nation.

Despite these aggressive tactics, Rodríguez said he remains confident that the overwhelming majority of UN member states will once again stand in solidarity with Cuba when the session convenes. He framed the upcoming debate as a critical opportunity to reaffirm the authority of international law and the core principles enshrined in the UN Charter.

Rodríguez defended the UN General Assembly as the global body best suited to adjudicate the issue, calling it “the most democratic, universal, and representative body of the United Nations” that is capable of addressing the dispute objectively in line with the UN’s founding purposes and values.

Closing his press conference, Rodríguez issued a urgent warning about the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground in Cuba, driven by intensifying U.S. pressure. “This is an urgent situation because the multidimensional aggression of the United States government against Cuba is already underway and intensifying. Its humanitarian damage is growing, and the suffering and deprivation it inflicts on our people increase every day,” he concluded.

In the wake of catastrophic back-to-back earthquakes that left northeastern Venezuela reeling from widespread destruction and heavy human loss, the Commonwealth of Dominica has stepped forward with urgent humanitarian support. Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit announced Thursday during an official press briefing that his government has greenlit an initial $500,000 financial donation to aid Venezuela’s disaster recovery efforts.

Skerrit emphasized that this contribution embodies the core values of cross-border solidarity and collaborative action when communities face existential crisis. “Venezuela has always been a valued friend, a neighbor,” he noted, extending the deep sympathy and collective solidarity of the Dominican people to both the Venezuelan government and the public grappling with the aftermath of the disaster.

The powerful seismic events hit northeastern Venezuela within hours of one another on June 24, 2026. The quakes reduced thousands of residential structures and public infrastructure to ruins, disrupted critical basic services, and forced panic-stricken local residents to evacuate into open streets for safety. As of the latest updates, global media outlets have confirmed that the death toll has surpassed 2,200, with more than 11,000 people sustaining injuries, and tens of thousands still remain unaccounted for amid the rubble.

Venezuelan authorities continue to work to map the full scale of destruction, even as persistent aftershocks hamper relief operations across affected regions. Emergency response teams have remained on the ground around the clock conducting search-and-rescue missions and preliminary damage evaluations, while the national government has mobilized all available resources to deliver aid to impacted communities. Skerrit acknowledged the immense scale of the challenge ahead, stressing that recovery will be an enormous uphill task for Venezuela’s government and its people.

Bilateral ties between Dominica and Venezuela have remained strong and cooperative for decades. Skerrit’s government has repeatedly extended political support to Caracas through past electoral processes, and has even offered to act as a neutral mediator to facilitate dialogue between Venezuela and the United States. For its part, Venezuela has been a key partner in Dominica’s national development, providing consistent assistance through regional integration frameworks including the PetroCaribe oil initiative and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).

When top climate finance and development stakeholders gathered for a high-stakes dialogue at the Caribbean Development Bank’s (CDB) 56th Annual Meeting in Nassau, The Bahamas this June, a clear, uncompromising message took center stage: the existing international financial framework is failing Small Island Developing States (SIDS), and transformative systemic reform is non-negotiable to help these climate-vulnerable nations adapt to worsening climate impacts. Held alongside the bank’s week-long gathering of regional and global development leaders from June 1 to 5, 2026, the invite-only discussion titled *“The Breakfast Exchange: A Climate Talk on the Global Economy”* convened a panel of seasoned experts to unpack systemic barriers to equitable climate resourcing and outline actionable pathways forward for at-risk regions across the globe. Moderated by CDB President Daniel M. Best, the conversation centered on the unique and disproportionate threats facing Caribbean SIDS, which rank among the world’s most climate-exposed nations despite contributing almost nothing to historical greenhouse gas emissions. Joining Best on the panel were four key figures shaping global climate action: Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, Executive Director of the UN-backed Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD); Ambassador Selwin Hart, Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on Climate Action and UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Racquel Moses, CEO of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator (CCSA) and Chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) Caribbean. Opening with a stark assessment of global climate investment inequity, Ambassador Hart laid bare the deep imbalance that has defined climate finance flows since the 2015 Paris Agreement was signed. He revealed that 80 percent of all global clean energy investment has flowed to high-income advanced economies, leaving just 20 percent to serve the two-thirds of the global population that calls developing nations home. “The biggest failure in the current global financial architecture is that the system continues to reward the drivers of the climate crisis while penalising those that are vulnerable and contributed the least,” Hart told attendees. Diong expanded on this critique, framing accessible climate finance as a three-pronged challenge that hinges on three non-negotiable pillars: consistent availability, streamlined accessibility, and fair affordability. Too often, he noted, headline-grabbing international funding pledges fail to translate to tangible support on the ground for vulnerable nations, because bureaucratic barriers and unfavorable terms lock countries out of the resources they need in a timely, affordable way. Diong explained that the FRLD, which has secured $820 million in voluntary contributions to date, is designed to upend this broken model. The fund’s first financing facility will offer 100 percent grant-based funding, with a minimum of 50 percent of all resources reserved exclusively for SIDS and Least Developed Countries — a policy designed to ensure recipient nations do not accumulate unsustainable new debt to address climate harms. “The keyword is delivery, delivery, delivery,” Diong emphasized. “We are talking about people’s lives here.” CDB President Best echoed this urgency, warning that Caribbean nations are facing rapidly escalating climate threats while navigating an increasingly volatile global economic landscape that squeezes their ability to invest in resilience. “Development financing delayed is development financing denied,” Best stressed, underscoring the need to speed up the flow of resources to the region. Hart went on to call for a structural shift in how the Caribbean approaches climate finance, arguing that the current model of expecting individual small nations to navigate fragmented accreditation processes for dozens of separate global funding bodies is inefficient and unfair. Instead, he proposed that the CDB take on an expanded, centralized role as the region’s dedicated climate finance coordinator. “CDB should be the region’s climate bank,” Hart said. He also pushed back against the longstanding global practice of using per capita national income as the primary eligibility threshold for grants and low-interest concessional climate financing. Hart pointed out that Caribbean nations including The Bahamas, Barbados, and Antigua and Barbuda are locked out of most concessional funding opportunities despite facing some of the highest climate vulnerability on Earth. Instead of relying on income metrics, Hart argued, climate vulnerability itself should be the core determinant of eligibility for international climate support. Looking ahead to emerging economic opportunities for the region, Moses urged Caribbean governments to proactively capitalize on two fast-growing global trends: the global transition to renewable energy and the exponential expansion of artificial intelligence, which has spurred skyrocketing demand for low-carbon energy to power data centers. “Right now, the biggest thing that’s happening is AI, and they are looking everywhere to find energy for data centres,” Moses noted. “If we explore our true renewable energy potential, we will have excess energy that we can provide.” She warned that the window to seize this economic opportunity is limited, noting, “These things happen in waves, and when this wave is gone, it’s gone.” Echoing Hart’s call for collective action, Moses emphasized that Caribbean nations will achieve far more by collaborating through shared regional institutions than by pursuing fragmented, independent strategies to secure climate finance and economic development. Closing the discussion, Hart offered a note of cautious optimism, tying progress directly to sustained regional cohesion. “Despite this climate crisis, our best days are yet ahead of us — but it requires us as a region to work as a region,” he said. The CDB’s 56th Annual Meeting, which ran from June 1 to 5 in Nassau, featured a full slate of knowledge-sharing sessions focused on addressing the Caribbean’s most pressing development challenges, from climate resilience to economic inequality. A full recording of *“The Breakfast Exchange: A Climate Talk on the Global Economy”* is now available for public viewing on the CDB’s official website and YouTube channel.