The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, dismissed the guerrilla war threats made by Miguel Díaz-Canel this Tuesday with a single phrase: "I don't think much about what he has to say," he stated to journalist Leo Feldman.
Rubio's response came hours after Díaz-Canel granted an exclusive interview to Newsweek — the first with a U.S. media outlet since 2023 — from the Presidential Palace in Havana, where he combined warlike rhetoric with calls for dialogue.
In that interview, Díaz-Canel stated: "We will always strive to avoid war. We will always work for peace. But if a military aggression occurs, we will counterattack, we will fight, we will defend ourselves."
The Cuban leader described the island's defensive strategy as a people's war, a doctrine that involves massive civil participation, and warned that any U.S. military action would result in "immense losses for both nations and their peoples", with human and material costs he deemed "incalculable."
Díaz-Canel also invoked the Cuban national anthem: "And if we fall in battle, to die for the homeland is to live."
In a turn that did not go unnoticed, Díaz-Canel himself had used almost the same phrase in that same interview which Rubio later mirrored back to him: regarding Donald Trump, the Cuban leader said that he "does not think much about what he has to say," dismissing his statements as irrelevant to Havana's foreign policy.
A White House official responded, stating that Trump believes an agreement with Cuba "would be very easy to achieve".
The statements come in the context of an unprecedented escalation of tensions between the two countries.
The Trump administration signed in January the Executive Order 14380, which declared the Cuban regime a serious and unusual threat to U.S. national security and blocked oil shipments to the island.
The measure has plunged Cuba into a severe energy crisis, with outages of up to 20-25 hours daily and a deficit of between 1,900 and 2,000 megawatts, affecting 64% of the country.
Rubio had been emphatic days earlier in describing the situation on the island: There is literally no economy, he said on Fox News in March, labeling the regime's leaders as "incompetent and incapable."
The Secretary of State had also clearly stated his position: "Cuba needs two things: economic reform and political reform. You cannot fix its economy without changing its system of government."
Last Monday, Democratic Congress members Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan Jackson visited Cuba and met with Díaz-Canel, a visit that the Republican Carlos Giménez criticized as hypocritical given that the regime maintains political prisoners in its jails.
Rubio had previously indicated that the administration would have more news on this matter quite soon regarding U.S. policy towards Cuba, a statement that has yet to be publicly defined but keeps Havana on alert.
Filed under: