US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate.
Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday.
Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military.
Photo: AP
“It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Air Force One as he traveled with US President Donald Trump to China.
“We’ll give them a chance, but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Rubio said. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to change the trajectory of Cuba as long as these people are in charge in that regime.”
Trump has said that the US could take over the nation 145km off Florida.
Rubio last week said after talks at the Vatican that Cuba had rejected a US offer of US$100 million in assistance, an assertion denied by Havana.
The US Department of State publicly renewed the proposal on Wednesday, a week after new US sanctions targeted key actors in Cuba’s state-controlled economy and their foreign partners.
“The regime refuses to allow the United States to provide this assistance to the Cuban people, who are in desperate need of assistance due to the failures of Cuba’s corrupt regime,” the state department said in a statement.
“The decision rests with the Cuban regime to accept our offer of assistance or deny critical [life]-saving aid and ultimately be accountable to the Cuban people for standing in the way of critical assistance,” it said.
The support would include direct humanitarian assistance, and funding for “fast and free” Internet access, it said.
Cuba has seen a series of rare protests as economic misery grips the nation of 9.6 million people.
On Wednesday, several dozen people, some banging pots and pans, protested against power outages in the San Miguel del Padron neighborhood on Havana’s outskirts, a resident said.
Several other neighborhoods saw similar protests by evening, with residents in Playa shouting: “Turn on the lights,” witnesses said.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel acknowledged the “particularly tense” situation, but pinned the blame squarely on the US.
“This dramatic worsening has a single cause: The genocidal energy blockade to which the United States subjects our country, threatening irrational tariffs against any nation that supplies us with fuel,” he wrote on X on Wednesday.
Cuba lost the source for about half its fuel needs when US forces snatched then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in a raid in January, with his successor complying with US pressure not to aid Cuba.
Since then, only one oil tanker, from Russia, has reached Cuba.
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