The Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed this Tuesday with a single phrase the military threats from the Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel: I don't think much about what he has to say, he replied to the press at the State Department in Washington.
The statement was made during a question-and-answer session prior to his bilateral meeting with New Zealand's Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, when a journalist asked him what he thought about the warnings that Díaz-Canel had issued earlier that day in an interview with Newsweek.
In that interview —the first that the Cuban leader granted to a U.S. media outlet since 2023—, Díaz-Canel threatened armed retaliation to any military action from Washington: "We will always strive to avoid war. We will always work for peace. But if military aggression occurs, we will counterattack, we will fight, we will defend ourselves".
The Cuban leader invoked the doctrine of the war of the whole people, which entails massive civil participation, and warned that any intervention would result in incalculable and immense losses for both nations.
What adds a layer of irony to the exchange is that, in that same interview with Newsweek, Díaz-Canel used a phrase almost identical to Rubio's when referring to President Donald Trump: "I don't think much about what he has to say."
Within hours, the Secretary of State returned the same gesture of verbal disdain, closing the circle with a symmetry that did not go unnoticed.
Díaz-Canel's threats come amid a sustained escalation of tensions between Washington and Havana since January 2026, when Trump signed Executive Order 14380, declaring the Cuban regime a unique and extraordinary threat to national security and imposing tariffs on countries supplying oil to the island.
This measure has worsened the already critical energy situation in Cuba, with blackouts of up to twenty hours daily, shortages of medicines, and widespread price increases.
In parallel, Trump made a series of statements about Cuba in March: on the 16th of that month he said "I will have the honor of taking Cuba"; on the 27th he claimed Cuba is next, but pretend I didn't say that; and on the 30th, he predicted that the regime "will fail in a short time." However, on March 13 he had explicitly ruled out direct military actions.
On the diplomatic front, Rubio has held at least half a dozen meetings with Cuban representatives, including Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of Raúl Castro, bypassing the official channels of the Communist Party.
Trump confirmed on March 17 that Cuba is talking to Marco Rubio and announced that they would be doing "something very soon." Washington's central condition is the resignation of Díaz-Canel, which he rejects as "non-negotiable."
Rubio himself was clear on March 28 when he stated the administration's position: "Their system of governance must change."
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