Ecuador and Costa Rica are showing democracies the way to break relations with the Cuban dictatorship.

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 22/03/2026

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The Cuban dictatorship uses the international representation system as a mechanism for publicity, infiltration, and legitimization of its cartel, which has institutionalized human rights violations and terrorism. Protected by immunities and privileges, the Cuban dictatorship's embassies and diplomats are instruments of aggression that threaten the security of the host country in order to secure its complicity, submission, or control. As a result, the governments of Ecuador and Costa Rica have severed diplomatic relations, demonstrating the path that reality demands of the democracies of the Americas.

Relations between states reach their highest level with the accreditation of ambassadors and the establishment of embassies, which represents recognition of the government of the receiving country and vice versa. Diplomatic relations are governed by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of April 18, 1961, within the framework of the United Nations.

Diplomatic immunities and privileges encompass the inviolability of mission premises, tax exemption, freedom of movement within the territory of the receiving state, inviolability of archives and documents, freedom of communication, inviolability of correspondence and diplomatic pouches, personal inviolability of diplomatic agents and their residences with tariff exemptions, and more. If a criminal group controls a state, it has extraordinary capabilities for cover-up and impunity.

Since the Castro regime seized power in 1959, Cuban embassies and diplomats have been “active agents,” that is, operators of organized crime who, taking advantage of immunities and privileges, conspired and assaulted democracies in the Americas and the world, making this activity one of the fundamental pillars of the maintenance of the absolutist tyranny that for 67 years has been the greatest source of aggression against human rights, freedom, and security.

On March 4, Ecuador severed diplomatic relations with the Cuban dictatorship, simply invoking Article 9 of the Vienna Convention, which states that “the receiving State may, at any time and without having to state the reasons for its decision, notify the sending State that the head or any other member of the diplomatic staff of the mission is persona non grata.” This decision follows a long history of Castro's interventionism in a country handed over by Rafael Correa's satellite dictatorship, which transformed it into a narco-state and a platform for 21st-century socialism, or Castro-Chavismo.

On March 18, Costa Rica closed its embassy in Cuba and expelled Cuban diplomats. President Rodrigo Chávez stated that “from now on, Costa Rica does not recognize the legitimacy of the communist regime in Cuba in view of the mistreatment, repression, and undignified conditions in which the inhabitants of that beautiful island are held.” The Foreign Minister expressed “deep concern” about the “sustained deterioration of the human rights situation on the island, as well as the increase in acts of repression against citizens, activists, and opposition members.”

Every country in the Americas has been, in some way, attacked, subjugated, or controlled by the Cuban dictatorship over the past 67 years. Invasions, urban and rural guerrilla warfare, drug trafficking, terrorism, narco-terrorism, infiltration through common crime, conspiracies, coups d'état, overthrows, assassinations, the dissemination of fake news, and all forms of hybrid, subversive, irregular, asymmetric, and frontal warfare. The so-called National Liberation Armies (ELN), the FARC, Montoneros, Tupamaros, Shining Path, MRTA, the Red Command and the Capital Command in Brazil, Mexican cartels, and the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian connections have left no form of criminal activity outside the Castro regime's sphere of influence.

Maintaining diplomatic relations with the center of transnational organized crime under these conditions poses a high national security risk, a naiveté no statesman can afford. That is why the decision by Ecuador and Costa Rica is the right one, driven by national interest that has nothing to do with ideologies, neither left nor right, because the time for granting political status to crime has passed since the dictator Nicolás Maduro was brought to justice.

The para-dictatorial or subservient governments of Mexico under Sheinbaum, Colombia under Petro, Brazil under Lula, and Uruguay under Orsi, as evidenced by the recent CELAC meeting (a Castro-Chavista mechanism), demonstrate clear subservience and commit high treason against the nation, attacks against national security, cover up for organized crime, and more. Their people will hold them accountable, because in a democracy, heads of government are "representatives" and will sooner rather than later be held responsible.

Countries like Argentina, which under the Kirchner governments was a satellite of Cuba that provided impunity to the Kirchner family, or like Bolivia, which continues to be permeated by Castro's doctrine in its school textbooks, its healthcare system replaced by slave-like doctors and an undetermined number of "Cuban diplomats" and secret agreements, or like Chile, which has become a partner of Boric, have no reason to maintain diplomatic relations with the leadership of organized crime. No government of the "Shield of the Americas" can recognize the Cuban dictatorship.

*Lawyer and Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».