Ben Rhodes, former national security advisor to President Barack Obama and one of the architects of the diplomatic thaw with Cuba in 2014, stated in a podcast by comedian Hasan Minhaj that the U.S. embargo is the main obstacle for the Cuban regime to adopt an economic model similar to that of Vietnam, and that the U.S. is responsible for "most" of the suffering of the Cuban people.
The statements, recorded on August 4 and published on August 26 in the program HMDK / Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know, were immediately amplified by the official Cuban press, including Cubadebate and Escambray, which reproduced them in full as support for the regime's narrative.
Rhodes stated that the Cuban Communist Party "would open its economy tomorrow if it could" and that when negotiating with officials from Havana, they "were studying Vietnam" and "wanted to be like Vietnam."
To explain why that transition does not occur, the former official pointed directly to Washington: "I would certainly bet that they couldn't maintain political control, because Vietnam is not 90 miles from Florida. But it's our fault."
Rhodes also linked the blackouts on the island to deaths of hospitalized patients: "I have personally spoken with Cuban-Americans who have had family members die because they were connected to a respirator, and it stopped working. If the electricity goes out, the neonatal intensive care unit ceases to function."
He concluded with a strong statement: "While we pass by Maduro in prison, we, the taxpayers, are funding a policy that is killing Cuban children and the elderly because some people in Florida want to reclaim that island."
Rhodes' argument, however, omits widely documented structural factors that contradict his central thesis.
The Cuban Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, himself refuted in August the narrative of a regime eager to reform: while presenting a package of 176 economic measures announced in June, Marrero was quick to clarify that the Cuban model “is not China, it is not Vietnam”, directly contradicting the image of a regime willing to open up if the U.S. would allow it.
The comparison with Vietnam is also structurally weak: that country adopted its market opening—Đổi Mới—in 1986, four decades ago, and its state participation in GDP is around 31%, compared to the 91% recorded by Cuba in 2019.
The energy crisis that Rhodes attributes almost exclusively to the embargo also has well-documented internal causes: the obsolescence of thermal power plants due to decades of underinvestment, mismanagement, and the collapse of subsidized Venezuelan oil supplies following Nicolás Maduro's capture in January 2026.
The Cuban government itself admitted that in the five months leading up to June of this year, only one oil tanker arrived on the island, and the power grid experienced deficits of 2,400 MW in August, with power outages lasting up to 25 hours daily in some provinces.
This is not the first time that Rhodes has publicly defended this position: in April, he already stated that Cubans are "suffering more than ever in their history", linking the deterioration to the energy sanctions from the Trump administration.
What their statements do not mention is that it has been 67 years of communist dictatorship —and not the embargo— that have prevented the Cuban people from accessing a functioning economy, and that the regime has systematically rejected the market reforms it claims to desire.
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