‘Back away from this podium’: UN ambassador posts video of confrontation with Cuban reps in General Assembly Hall

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz on Tuesday posted a video depicting a confrontation between U.S. and Cuban officials while he spoke at the podium of the U.N. General Assembly chamber.

The video shows Cuban officials standing and speaking to Waltz, who can be heard saying one of them needs “to back away from this podium.”

“He’s not going to intimidate me in the United States of America like he tries to intimidate political prisoners,” the audio continues, with Waltz yelling, “and I’m the representative of the United States of America. Back up!”

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez is then heard raising his voice back at the former national security adviser, “You are a liar!”

More shouts are heard before Waltz urges the delegation to “please sit down. Bye. Sit down.”

Waltz later wrote in a post to the social platform X , where he shared the video, that Cuban officials can “think again about trying that nonsense in the United States of America.”

“The Castro regime has profited at the expense of the Cuban people with luxury cars, expensive watches and a private island resort,” Waltz wrote. “As I shared this with the world, regime thugs rushed the stage to interrupt my speech.”

He also shared several more videos to X of his speech blasting the Cuban regime , with one post accusing the “so called ‘diplomats'” of “melting down at the first hint of criticism in the middle of the UN.” He again compared it to “what happens to those who speak out under the iron fist of the Cuban regime at home in Havana.”

Rodríguez wrote on X that Waltz “forgets that he is at the United Nations, not at the US National Security Council, nor in a Green Berets unit, nor in a Signal group, where he has repeatedly shown his incompetence and incapacity.”

“The US government, with its crude lies at the General Assembly of the United Nations, launched a new desperate attempt to justify the economic aggression against Cuba and its criminal energy siege. … There is no pretext for sustaining the act of collective punishment to which they subject the Cuban people,” the foreign minister added.

The break from diplomatic decorum in the meeting place of the international body comes after months of rising tensions between the two nations.

President Trump has sought to pressure Cuba’s government to change after delivering crushing sanctions and imposing a blockade on energy into the island country. The actions led to debilitating conditions and massive power outages.

Trump administration officials and their allies have warned that Cuba’s regime would be the next to fall after the U.S. capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January and the start of the Iran war on Feb. 28.

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said days after the conflict with the Iranian regime started that Cuba was “next.”

“Well, the truth is Cuba has already fallen ,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News’s Sean Hannity last month. “It does not have a functional economy, and it is governed by people who continue to preach about some revolution that has been dead for 20 years. It’s never worked.”