HAVANA, CUBA — With one week left in office, Colombian President Gustavo Petro boarded his last diplomatic flight for Havana — closing out four years in power with a final, deliberate gesture of solidarity with the region’s most isolated socialist government — days before his successor severs relations with it entirely.
A Last-Minute Change of Plans
Petro’s original closing itinerary looked very different. He had planned to travel to the United States for a United Nations conference on natural resource governance and to visit OAS headquarters in Washington. That trip fell apart when the president of the Republic of Congo could not attend the UN conference, reducing its protocol level; Petro explained the cancellation himself on X, writing that the diminished conference status led him to call off the U.S. trip altogether.
In its place, he announced a new destination: Cuba.
The Visit Itself
Petro landed in Havana on Friday, July 31, for a roughly 48-hour visit that included bilateral meetings with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Colombia’s Foreign Minister, Rosa Villavicencio — whose own term ends on the same date as Petro’s, August 6 — said the president had simply “wanted to go to the island,” describing it as an official visit undertaken in his capacity as president through his final day in office.
The stated purpose was to deliver a message of Colombian government solidarity with Cuba amid the island’s severe economic and social crisis, and to see conditions on the ground firsthand.
This marked Petro’s third visit to Cuba as president, following a June 2023 trip tied to peace negotiations with the ELN guerrilla group and a September 2023 visit for the G77+China summit. Taken together, the three trips trace a consistent thread running through Petro’s foreign policy: sustained, explicit engagement with Havana as a matter of political principle, not incidental diplomacy.
A Pointed Contrast With What Comes Next
The symbolism of the trip is impossible to separate from what happens one week later. President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella takes office August 7 in Cali, and has already announced that Colombia will break diplomatic relations with Cuba as part of his sweeping foreign policy reversal — a rupture that would mark just the third time in Colombian history that the two countries have severed ties.
Cuba’s Foreign Ministry rejected de la Espriella’s announcement on July 28, and the Cuban government has separately accused the incoming administration of acting in “subordination” to Washington’s policy, pointing to a July 15 meeting in Washington between Vice President-elect José Manuel Restrepo and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as evidence of the new government's alignment.
Petro’s trip, then, functions as a deliberate bookend: four years of explicit political affinity with Cuba’s government, closing just as his successor prepares to reverse that relationship entirely.
Cuban state media outlet Cubadebate ran the story under a headline noting pointedly that Petro chose Cuba “and not the United States” for his final trip — framing the visit, from Havana’s side, as a statement in itself.
How Cuba Is Reading the Moment
Reaction from Cuban and allied commentators captured the stakes as they see them. One comment beneath Cubadebate’s coverage, from a reader identifying as writing from Mexico, argued that de la Espriella “is wrong to announce the breaking of relations between Colombia and Cuba,” invoking the intellectual and cultural ties between the two nations symbolized by José Martí and Gabriel García Márquez, and expressing hope that “the peoples will continue that relationship of fraternal love and revolutionary friendship” regardless of what governments decide.
Uruguay’s Communist Party newspaper published its own editorial the same day, insisting “Cuba is not, and will never be, alone” — part of a broader wave of solidarity messaging coinciding with Petro’s visit, which also included a donation of solar energy kits from an Argentine solidarity movement arriving in Cuba the same day.
What This Says About Petro’s Legacy
For a president whose foreign policy consistently prioritized solidarity with the region’s left-leaning and internationally isolated governments — from his Cuba engagement to his rupture with Israel over Gaza in 2024 — the choice to spend his final days in office in Havana rather than Washington reads as a considered final statement rather than a scheduling accident, whatever the immediate cancellation of his U.S. plans.
It closes out his presidency in the same register it was conducted throughout: explicitly aligned with a bloc of governments Washington and Colombia’s own incoming administration regard as adversarial, at the exact moment that alignment is about to be formally dismantled by the government that succeeds him.
What Awaits
Petro hands power to de la Espriella on August 7, at which point Colombia’s diplomatic posture toward Cuba, Nicaragua, Israel, and Washington itself all shift in the opposite direction from where Petro leaves them.
Whatever goodwill his final visit built with Havana will have essentially no time to translate into policy before Bogotá’s approach reverses; the practical effect of the trip is symbolic rather than durable. But for a presidency defined substantially by its ideological commitments in foreign affairs, ending on a visit to Havana rather than Washington may be exactly the kind of parting statement Petro intended to leave behind.
