Cuban foreign minister says Rubio’s ‘personal and corrupt’ agenda risks peace prospects

NEW YORK (AP):

Recent US escalations in the Caribbean are a result of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “personal” agenda against the region, Cuba’s top diplomat said, adding that his American counterpart is increasingly pushing policies that do not align with President Donald Trump’s so-called mandate for peace.

Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla told The Associated Press (AP) that Cuba saw a possibility of changing the longstanding antagonistic dynamic between the United States and the communist-run island when Trump returned to office in January. But he added that Rubio, who was born to Cuban immigrants, has made it his mission for Washington to adopt an even stronger “maximum pressure” campaign against Havana.

“The current secretary of state was not born in Cuba, has never been to Cuba, and knows nothing about Cuba,” Rodríguez said in a sit-down interview with AP on Tuesday. “But there is a very personal and corrupt agenda that he is carrying out, which seems to be sacrificing the national interests of the US in order to advance this very extremist approach.”

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment. Rubio and US officials have defended their aggressive stance against Cuba, accusing its leaders of running a dictatorship.

“The US will continue to stand for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the people of Cuba, and make clear no illegitimate, dictatorial regimes are welcome in our hemisphere,” Rubio said in a July statement.

The foreign minister and other Cuban officials have been toeing the diplomatic lines with the Trump administration as they seek an end to a six-decade-long US economic embargo, which, while failing to overthrow the government, has caused widespread energy blackouts, food shortages and inflation.

In public statements and speeches, officials have strayed away from directly criticising Trump for the series of aggressive actions his administration has taken against Cuba in the first eight months of his second term. Those include restoring a gamut of restrictive economic sanctions that were eased during the terms of Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. In the days before leaving office, Biden had moved to lift the US designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Trump moved the country back to the list the day after his inauguration. The US has also made Cuba one of seven countries facing heightened restrictions on visitors and revoked temporary legal protections that had shielded about 300,000 Cubans from deportation. The administration has also announced visa restrictions on Cuban and foreign government officials involved in Cuba’s medical missions, which Rubio has called “forced labour”.

Rodríguez, who has served as foreign minister since 2009, blames these escalations against Cuba and the recent ones against Venezuela squarely on the “bipolar” State Department, not the Trump White House. He added that Trump “portrays himself as an advocate of peace”, but it’s Rubio who “promotes the use of force or the threat to use force as an everyday, customary tool.”

Before being tapped as secretary of state and national security adviser, Rubio had already exerted influence over US policy toward Latin America during Trump’s first term.

The former Florida senator has admitted that his interest in targeting leftist Latin American leaders has been personal. His parents are Cuban immigrants who arrived in Miami in 1956, shortly before Fidel Castro’s 1959 communist revolution. He grew up in Miami, where many Cubans sought refuge after Castro’s rise to power.

His consistent criticism of communism has helped win him support from thousands of members of the Venezuelan diaspora who made Florida their new home to escape crime, economic deprivation and unrest under Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez, who assumed the presidency in 1999 and began his self-described socialist revolution.