Tuesday’s shouting match at the United Nations just cost a Cuban diplomat his posting. US Ambassador Mike Waltz says Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signed the paperwork to eject the official accused of shoving an American diplomat on the General Assembly floor.
The official is Richard Tur de la Concepcion, first secretary of Cuba’s permanent mission to the UN. In video Waltz shared himself, Tur de la Concepcion grabs at the phone of US diplomat J.P. Freire, who was filming Waltz’s clash with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, wags a finger in his face and pushes the phone away.
Waltz laid it out on Fox News on Tuesday night: the Cuban delegate, in his telling, shoved and tried to assault a member of the American delegation, and the answer was already signed.
“He’s gone. He’s going to be on a plane to Havana within the next 24 hours.”
Mike Waltz, US ambassador to the UN
The expulsion grows straight out of the floor fight TRIIP covered Tuesday, when Rodriguez walked to the podium mid speech, called Waltz a liar, and got told this is not his dictatorship and he cannot silence anybody. Waltz also accused the Cuban delegation of pressing UN staff to cut his microphones while he spoke. Rodriguez answered on social media, accusing Washington of lying in what he called a crude and permanent manner.
All of it lands the day before the General Assembly’s annual vote on the resolution condemning the US embargo on Cuba, a vote Havana has won overwhelmingly for 34 straight years. The resolution was never in doubt. The diplomat on the plane home is the part nobody scripted.
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