Cuba’s leader said Tuesday he would face “unbreakable resistance” if the US tried to take over the impoverished island nation, as communist officials scrambled to fully restore electricity across the country.
Cuba’s government is under increasingly crushing pressure, with Washington enforcing an oil embargo and openly saying it wants to end the nearly seven-decade-old US standoff with the unilateral communist state.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Cuba’s decision announced this week to allow exiles to invest and own businesses did not go far enough to allow free-market reforms sought by the Trump administration.
“What he announced yesterday was not dramatic enough. It’s not going to be fixed. So he’s going to have to make some big decisions,” Rubio, a Cuban-American and vocal critic of the country’s ruling party, told reporters at the White House.
President Donald Trump, who has put pressure on Cuba’s communist government, said on Monday he would “take over” Cuba: “We’re going to do something with Cuba very soon.”
But his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Diaz-Canel, countered Washington’s threats.
“Faced with a dire situation, Cuba has one guarantee: any external aggressor will face unbreakable resistance,” he wrote in a statement at X.
Cuba is open to broader talks with Washington and allowing more investment, but it will not discuss changing its political system, an ambassador told AFP on Tuesday.
Tanieris DeGuez, Cuba’s deputy chief of mission in Washington, said the two neighboring countries “have a lot of things to put on the table” but should not ask the other to change its government.
“It has nothing to do with our political system, nothing to do with our political model – our constitutional model – is part of the negotiations and will never be part of it,” he said.
“The only thing Cuba asks for in any dialogue is respect for our sovereignty and our right to self-determination.”
The New York Times, citing unnamed U.S. officials, said the Trump administration had called for the firing of Diaz-Canel, who views Cuba as resistant to change.
Rubio denied the report late Tuesday, calling the article “fake,” writing in X that it was one of several media reports relying on “charlatans and liars” as sources.
‘Taking Cuba’
Monday’s total power outage underscored the paralyzed state of Cuba’s economy.
The country lost Venezuela as its main regional ally and oil supplier after a US military operation toppled Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolás Maduro this January.
Power was restored to two-thirds of the country by early Tuesday, including 45 percent of the capital, Havana, home to 1.7 million people.
“What we fear all the time is that the blackout will drag on and we’ll lose what little we have in the fridge, because everything is so expensive,” said Olga Suarez, a 64-year-old retiree.
“Otherwise we use it because here is the time you go to bed and wake up without electricity,” he told AFP.
Adding another scare, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Cuba early Tuesday morning. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
Cuba’s aging power generation system has deteriorated, with daily power outages lasting up to 20 hours in some parts of the island, which lacks the fuel needed to generate electricity.
But since Maduro’s ouster on January 3, the island’s economy has been further damaged by the de facto US oil embargo.
No oil has been imported into Cuba since January 9, hitting the power sector and forcing airlines to curtail flights to the island, a blow to its all-important tourism sector.
And Trump is clearly saying he wants the Cuban government to fall.
“You know, all my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba. When is the United States going to do it?” Trump told reporters Monday.
“I believe I have the honor of taking Cuba,” Trump said.
“Let me set it free, take it—I think I can do anything with it, you want to know the truth. They’re a very weak nation right now.”
(With FRANCE 24 AFP)
(tags to translate)America
