Cuba • Caribbean • World
Gonsalves calls US hostility toward Cuba ‘unnatural and unnecessary’ in Washington keynote
Months after leaving office, St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ former prime minister used a Congressional Black Caucus week forum to brand the US blockade ‘entirely farcical’ and to lay out a four-point plan for normalizing relations between Havana and Washington.
Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who governed St. Vincent and the Grenadines for nearly 25 years before his party’s landslide defeat last November, returned to the international stage on Wednesday to press the United States for a diplomatic reset with Cuba, calling Washington’s framing of the island as a national security threat “entirely farcical.”
Speaking at the Historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in the US capital, Gonsalves delivered the keynote at a national forum titled “Resolving the U.S. Provoked Crisis in Cuba: Normalizing Relations with Our Neighbor.” The event was convened by the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW21) and its Pan-African Unity Dialogue, and staged during the week of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference.
The former prime minister accused the United States of using its economic power as a weapon. He said the most powerful country the world has ever seen was “seeking to starve the people of Cuba into submission, to renounce their independence, their sovereignty, their right to pursue their own form of government.”
“It is entirely farcical to say that Cuba represents a national security threat to the United States of America.”Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, former prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Gonsalves argued that Washington was reaching back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, revived, he said, with what he called a “Trump corollary” set out in the national security document the US president proclaimed in November last year. The effect, he contended, was a claim that every state and people in the hemisphere must be subject to United States hegemony.
The Trump remarks he read aloud
To make his point, Gonsalves quoted remarks President Donald Trump made at the White House on March 16, 2026. In those comments, widely reported at the time, Trump said he believed he would have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding that whether he chose to “free it” or “take it,” he could “do anything I want with it.” The president described Cuba as “a failed nation” with “no money” and “no oil,” and, in the version Gonsalves read, mused that he would “really like to get my hands on some of the real estate.”
Gonsalves said he takes the words of a US president seriously whoever holds the office, and rejected the idea that Trump should be dismissed as a buffoon. “I listen carefully to what people say and what they don’t say,” he told the audience.
An argument anchored in 1964
Much of the address rested on a message the late Fidel Castro sent President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, the embargo and repeated attempts on the Cuban leader’s life. In it, Castro wrote that the hostility between the two countries was “both unnatural and unnecessary” and could be eliminated through a mature discussion of their differences.
Every Cuban president since has held the same open door, Gonsalves said, from Raul Castro during his thaw with President Barack Obama to the current leader, Miguel Diaz-Canel, who has called for talks “without preconditions.” Cuba and the United States were neighbours 90 miles apart, he noted, bound by shared Western values and a mutual love of baseball, though he could not resist adding that cricket was, in his view, “a superior sport.”
A four-point plan
Gonsalves closed with a framework for breaking the standoff:
- The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) should engage both Havana and Washington directly, citing a regional security and economic interest in normalization.
- The United Nations Secretary-General, with the concurrence of the Security Council, should broker a resolution to what Gonsalves called a dangerous standoff.
- The US Congress and Senate should press the Trump administration to open a framework for talks.
- Supporters worldwide should build a broad alliance for Cuba, including partners in Africa, China and Latin America interested in doing business with the island.
A crisis backdrop
The forum came amid the sharpest US-Cuba confrontation in years. Since the start of 2026, the Trump administration has tightened an energy blockade that has left the island facing fuel shortages and repeated blackouts, threatened sanctions on countries that export oil to Cuba, and floated what the president has described as a “friendly takeover.” In March, Diaz-Canel publicly confirmed his government was in talks with Washington.
Introducing the keynote, IBW21 president Dr. Ron Daniels described Gonsalves as a “global statesman” and a driving force, alongside Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, behind the Caribbean reparations movement and CARICOM’s Ten-Point Plan. Daniels also reminded the audience that IBW’s late director of international relations, Don Rojas, was a son of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, often mistaken for a Grenadian because of his work with Maurice Bishop.
The view from home
For Vincentians, the Washington appearance carried a domestic subtext. Gonsalves is now leader of the opposition after the Unity Labour Party was reduced to a single seat, his own, in the November 27 general election won in a landslide by Godwin Friday’s New Democratic Party. His son and former finance minister, Camillo Gonsalves, lost his seat in the same vote.
The keynote signalled that the former prime minister intends to remain a visible figure on the regional and international scene. A fixture of Cuba solidarity for decades, Gonsalves told the forum he has been visiting the island since 1976 and has known its leadership across three presidencies.
“This rupture can be healed.”Gonsalves, urging Americans to accept a normalized relationship with Cuba
The healing, he argued, would require Washington to set aside what he described as the psychological, economic and electoral drivers of its Cuba policy, in particular the pull of presidential politics in South Florida. Only then, he said, could the region move toward “peace and justice and shared prosperity.”
Vincypowa News • Power to the People. Reporting verified against the forum livestream and contemporaneous coverage of the address.