Costa Rica’s foreign minister spent the weekend defending a diplomatic split with Cuba that Havana says it was never formally told about, and by Sunday the dispute had opened a second front at home, with Costa Rica’s Communist Party accusing President Laura Fernández of servility toward Washington.
Foreign Minister Manuel Tovar Rivera made his most forceful statement yet yesterday, writing that Costa Rica is not indifferent to what he called a vile tyranny that for more than six decades has denied freedom and prosperity to the Cuban people, who he said now live in despicable poverty. He added that his government is firm and clear in its break with the Castro regime.
The remarks were delivered in Miami. Tovar set out his position on Sept. 19 at Miami Dade College, where he received the 2026 Pedro Luis Boitel International Freedom Prize at an event organized by the Cuban Resistance Assembly. He had spoken to the Miami Herald a day earlier, telling the paper that Costa Rica had broken relations with the Cuban regime until freedom returns.
Havana’s foreign ministry responded that it learned of the decision through news coverage. According to MINREX, Costa Rica’s foreign ministry sent a diplomatic note on March 17, 2026, informing Cuba of its unilateral decision to close its embassy in Havana and asking that Cuban diplomatic staff leave San José, leaving only consular and administrative personnel.
In that same communication, then-Foreign Minister Arnoldo André Tinoco told Havana explicitly that those measures did not constitute a break in diplomatic relations. Cuba also noted that Costa Rica’s own public communiqué of March 18 made no mention of formal split.
Cuba took particular issue with how the announcement was made. MINREX pointed to the channel Tovar chose — a South Florida news outlet rather than formal diplomatic channels — and characterized it as an act of subordination to U.S. policy toward Cuba. Tovar has rejected that reading. He told the Miami Herald it was a sovereign decision taken by the government of Costa Rica, and that his ministry received no advice, guidance, instruction or suggestion from any government, American or otherwise.
Timing has fed the suspicion. Tovar met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington this week, a meeting Costa Rica’s foreign ministry said covered security, migration and economic cooperation. That sequence is now the core of the domestic complaint. The Partido Vanguardia Popular noted that Costa Rica’s own foreign ministry had described the Washington meeting as reaffirming the excellent state of bilateral relations, and that Tovar publicly confirmed the Cuba split days later.
The party issued its statement calling the decision a shameful demonstration of Costa Rican foreign policy’s submission to U.S. geopolitical interests and saying the country cannot be allowed to act as a puppet of foreign interests. It also backed Havana’s procedural objection, calling it especially serious that a decision of this nature was announced to American media before any formal communication to the state involved.
For the Cuban community in Costa Rica — estimated at between 10,000 and 15,000 people, including roughly 3,000 with residency cards and about 7,000 with applications pending — the practical situation has not changed. The split does not interrupt consular services for Cuban citizens in Costa Rica; consular and administrative staff remain in place to serve them. Costa Ricans who visit or transit Cuba are being routed to the Costa Rican embassy in Panama.
That arrangement is not a contradiction. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations establishes that breaking diplomatic relations does not automatically terminate consular relations. It is also part of why the two governments describe the same facts differently: Havana maintains that what happened in March was a reduction of ties to the consular sphere rather than a complete break.
The paper trail does not fully settle it. Costa Rica’s diplomatic mission in Havana ceased operations on May 1, 2026, according to the foreign ministry’s own directory. No new diplomatic note replacing the March communication has been made public. The two countries have been here before.
Costa Rica severed relations with Cuba in September 1961 and restored them in March 2009, repealing the decree that had kept them broken. Tovar has called that 2009 restoration, carried out under President Óscar Arias, a foreign policy error, and says the current break will hold until the Cuban people recover their freedom.
