ABSTRACT
On 26 October 2010, by a vote of 187 for, two against, and three abstentions, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly endorsed a Cuban-sponsored resolution reproving the United States’ unilateral illegal economic sanctions against the island and demanding its end.1 The two votes opposing came from the American and Israeli delegations. Washington’s most important allies, including the European Union (EU), Canada, Japan, and Australia, joined Cuba. It was the nineteenth consecutive time that the General Assembly had taken such an unbalanced pronouncement. How is it possible that a small state, lacking in the necessary attributes of ‘hard power’, is able to produce such a diplomatically successful outcome against the world’s largest superpower? One answer is that even Great Powers make mistakes and that the sanctions against Cuba, adopted during the Cold War, are a case in point. But it does not reveal the whole truth. Even if Washington’s Cuba policy is one of the most absolutely unilateral actions taken by its policy-making elite, it does not reasonably explain how Cuban diplomacy has garnered the support of practically the whole world, including countries that, in the last analysis, coincide with the United States in their ‘regime change’ policy towards Cuba.
