Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua barred from Americas summit

Jim Wyss, Bloomberg News on Oct 1, 2025

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Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are once again being excluded from the Summit of the Americas, a regional meeting of leaders from across the hemisphere.

The Dominican Republic’s foreign ministry said the three U.S. foes, which don’t participate in the Organization of American States, had been excluded for “the good of the meeting.”

“Given the current context of political polarization, we have decided to prioritize the success of the meeting by extending the invitation to as many countries as possible,” the ministry said late Tuesday.

Cuba’s foreign ministry said the decision had been “imposed” on the Dominican government by an increasingly hostile U.S., singling out “the brutal unilateral pressures of the U.S. Secretary of State” Marco Rubio.

The U.S. State Department declined to comment. Rubio, speaking alongside Dominican President Luis Abinader in Santo Domingo, said in February that the three “regimes have contributed to the instability of the region,” but that the final invite list was up to the host country.

“A Summit of the Americas built on exclusion and coercion is doomed to failure,” the Cuban government said in a statement. “There can be no serious talk of ‘political dialog’ between our America and the United States based on censorship and exclusion, inequality and abuse.”

The event, which takes place roughly every four years, is considered one of the premier diplomatic events in the hemisphere. The last summit in 2022 was hosted in Los Angeles and the U.S. also decided to exclude the same three nations. This year’s event will be held in the Dominican resort of Punta Cana in December.

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