The ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel stated that the Cuban revolution would have achieved many more "conquests" if the U.S. embargo had not existed, which he described as "the noose around the neck" of the Cuban people.
The statements published this Friday in a capsule on the official account of the Presidency of Cuba on X are part of the interview granted to Brazilian journalist Breno Altman for the "20 Minutes" program from Opera Mundi, recorded in Havana, which aired on April 21.
"We have not been able to become what we have dreamed of being, what we have planned to be. We have achieved a lot. In the midst of those circumstances, that is a merit of the Cuban Revolution, that is a merit of the heroic Cuban people who resist and who also create," said Díaz-Canel.
The head of state went further by attributing the gap between what was promised and what has been achieved to the embargo. "We could have gone much further, we could have achieved many more accomplishments, we could be in a better situation if we hadn't had that noose of the blockade around our neck all this time," he emphasized.
Díaz-Canel concluded his argument with a rhetorical question. "The blockade, I tell you responsibly, is the main detriment to the lives of Cubans. Let's lift the blockade and see how we perform. What wouldn’t Cuba be capable of without that blockade?"
The statements come at the worst energy moment that Cuba has experienced in decades. Díaz-Canel himself admitted in the same interview that the island was four consecutive months without receiving a single drop of imported fuel, operating solely with national crude oil production, which covers barely 40% of its needs.
Power outages have reached 30 to 40 consecutive hours in some communities, and the regime acknowledged a list of over 96,000 people awaiting surgery, including more than 11,000 children, as a direct consequence of the crisis.
The trigger was the Executive Order 14380, signed by President Donald Trump on January 29, which imposed tariffs on countries supplying oil to Cuba, cutting between 80% and 90% of crude oil imports.
The only relief came with a Russian shipment of 730,000 barrels donated free of charge, enough to cover barely ten days of needs, which Díaz-Canel described as "symbolic," but he acknowledged that it partially reactivated more than 1,200 megawatts of distributed generation that had been inactive for four months.
The argument of the embargo as the main cause of Cuba's troubles is a staple of the official discourse of the regime, especially after 1991, and it is systematically used to evade responsibility for 67 years of failed economic management under the communist model.
In the same interview, Díaz-Canel ruled out negotiating political changes with Washington and admitted that the talks with the United States are in a "very preliminary phase", following a meeting on April 11 between Cuban officials and a delegation from the State Department in Havana, the first official U.S. aircraft to land on the island since 2016.
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