Cuba’s foreign minister lashed out at U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, calling him “a fraud” and “an international criminal,” in a personal attack that suggests the island’s government has given up on improving its strained relationship with the Trump administration amid heightened fears of a potential U.S. military action in Venezuela.
Asked in a press conference Tuesday about his expectations for the relationship with the United States, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez accused Rubio of executing a “violent” and “politically motivated agenda “tied to dark, corrupt interests, particularly in Florida,” to provoke egime change in Cuba.
“The Secretary of State is a fraud, who was neither born in Cuba nor knows anything about Cuba,” he said during a press conference that followed a presentation to foreign diplomats in Havana of Cuba’s latest report about the impact of the U.S. embargo.
“His nefarious role in relation to the genocide in Gaza,” he added, “places him as an international criminal.”
The U.S. Department of State declined to comment.
Rodriguez is known to use inflammatory rhetoric against the U.S. regularly. Still, the personal accusations against the secretary of state in a room full of foreign diplomats suggest the island’s government has given up on diplomacy and is bracing for further confrontation.
Soon after Trump won the presidential election and Rubio was nominated as secretary, Cuban officials quietly reached out to contacts in the U.S. They were seeking advice on how to circumvent Rubio — a Cuban American former senator and a hardliner on Cuba policy — and how best to deal with President Donald Trump, whom the Cubans perceived as more transactional, Herald sources said.
For months, Cuban diplomats and state media outlets have relentlessly criticized Rubio and the U.S. ambassador in Havana, Mike Hammer. Rubio’s “tough Cuba policy” has included sanctions on the island’s handpicked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and military officials and enterprises. He has also pressured foreign governments, including several in the Caribbean region, to stop hiring Cuban doctors through the Cuban official missions, due to allegations of forced labor. But to this day, Cuban officials are careful not to name Trump by name when disparaging his policies towards Cuba, Venezuela and the war in Gaza.
Cuba has continued receiving deportation flights from the U.S. in an effort to cooperate on an issue high on Trump’s agenda, although Havana continues refusing to accept Cubans with criminal records.
In July, Johana Tablada, a top Cuban Foreign Ministry official responsible for the U.S., complained that she and Vice Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío had been snubbed by the State Department and could not arrange any meetings when they traveled to Washington. She accused Rubio and other U.S. officials of wanting “to blow up what’s left of the relationship,” but she said Cuba was not going to take the bait.
“The adult in the room is the Cuban government,” Tablada said. “If we did what they wanted, we’d be giving a pretext for those people who want to break off relations, create a migration crisis and prompt a military intervention from the United States.”
Worries about Venezuela grow
The latest events in the Caribbean have been another test of the Cuba- U.S. relationship.
Rodriguez’s virulent tirade against Rubio comes in the middle of increased tensions in the region because of the sizable deployment of U.S. military assets near Venezuela, Cuba’s closest ally. Cuban top officials, including Díaz-Canel, have said the United States is preparing for some sort of military action against the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela, beyond the deployment’s stated purpose of fighting drug cartels in the Caribbean.
Cuba’s intelligence forces are known to operate in Venezuela and provide security services and advice to Maduro. It is not known what kind of support the Cuban government is prepared to provide in case of a military action against Venezuela. On Thursday, Roberto Morales Ojeda, a top official in the island’s Communist Party Central Committee who is seen as a contender to succeed Díaz-Canel, met with Diosdado Cabello, Maduro’s interior minister.
“The enemy has always been the same, but now it’s even more voracious,” Cabello said about the United States during the meeting, according to Cuban official media. “Whoever messes with Cuba messes with Venezuela, and vice versa.”
In a publication on X, Morales said that his visit, which coincided with military exercises conducted by Maduro’s forces, is “a demonstration, as always, of the total willingness to collaborate and be on the side of the Venezuelan people in their struggles.”
On Thursday, Rodriguez shared a statement by “the Revolutionary Government of Cuba” calling on other nations to mobilize to prevent “a military aggression” against Venezuela, blaming it again on Rubio “and other like-minded senators and Congress members.”
“Cuba has repeatedly warned that the deployment of U.S. military forces in the Caribbean in recent weeks is a provocation intended to unleash a military conflict that would compel the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the statement said. “The true purpose of these actions is to seize the oil and natural resources of Venezuela.
Blaming the economic crisis on the embargo
Rodriguez also accused the United States of inflicting “extraordinary humanitarian damage to our people,” in remarks presenting an annual report that precedes a United Nations vote on a resolution to end the U.S. embargo on Cuba. The minister claimed the embargo caused damages estimated at $7.5 billion between March 2024 and February 2025 and that if the sanctions had not been in place, Cuba’s economy would have grown by 9.2%.
Cuban economists have noted that U.S. sanctions are one of several factors in the country’s current crisis, and that the Cuban government is able to pass on the effect of sanctions to the population. But research efforts to quantify the effects have been scarce.
The figures presented regularly by the government are believed to overestimate the financial cost of the sanctions because they include several estimates based on hypothetical situations, including, for example, estimated revenue for the sale of Cuban products to American consumers and savings on shipping costs based on the premise that Cuba would almost exclusively import goods from the United States, including supplies like syringes that American companies source in other markets such as China. The figure is particularly high this year because the government also included $2.5 billion in damages for the loss of workers to a migration wave Cuban authorities blame on the United States.
The report also claims the embargo deprived the government from the money needed to buy medicines and other necessities. But a recent Herald investigation based on a leak of secret accounting documents for the country’s largest military conglomerate, GAESA, shows it had $14,5 billion deposited in bank accounts and $18 billion in assets as of March 2024.
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