First, it was Venezuela. Now it’s Cuba.
And Cuba is cowering after America moved to take them down.
An Interview That Answers Its Own Questions
If you wanted a real-time demonstration of why the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Cuba is justified, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla provided one Tuesday in an exclusive sit-down with Fox News anchor Gillian Turner on The Story. Sitting for an interview with an American journalist, Rodriguez spent the segment accusing Secretary of State Marco Rubio of being a deliberate liar, complaining about the energy blockade that has plunged Cuba into darkness, and questioning the legal basis for the indictment of former President Raúl Castro for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue m*rders.
He also tried to dismiss the idea that Cuba poses any security threat to the United States, invoking the island’s physical size as his primary defense.
“Cuba is a small island — 100,000 square kilometers and 10 million inhabitants,” Rodriguez said. “Based on what logic, what would be the common sense behind the idea that Cuba could threaten a nuclear superpower?”
The argument would be more persuasive if the threat assessment were primarily about Cuba’s military capacity to invade Florida. It isn’t. Cuba maintains documented relationships with Iran, Hezbollah, and other entities that the United States designates as terrorist organizations. It hosts Russian military intelligence facilities. It allows Chinese monitoring infrastructure on its territory. And it has, for sixty years, provided a safe haven for fugitives from American justice, including convicted m*rderers and terrorists who have been living on the island under the protection of a government that has refused every extradition request. The “small island” framing is a rhetorical dodge, not a substantive response to those concerns.
The Rubio Attack — And What It Actually Reveals
Rodriguez did not mince words about the secretary of state. “In all areas, however, he lies, he lies on and on. He continuously intends to deceive the public opinion in the U.S., the U.S. Congress and the international community,” Rodriguez said.
He also took a personal shot: “He was not born in Cuba. He does not know Cuba. He knows nothing about Cuba.”
That last line deserves particular attention. Rubio’s parents came to the United States from Cuba. They were not, as he once incorrectly suggested, exiles fleeing Castro — they left before the revolution. But they came from a Cuba that existed under the same family regime that Rodriguez now serves as foreign minister. The idea that Rubio knows nothing about Cuba — delivered by a diplomat of a government that has imprisoned political dissidents, executed opponents, and suppressed every free election since 1959 — is not a credible critique. It is a propaganda line.
Rodriguez also questioned why the indictment of Raúl Castro had come “after 30 years,” asking what “ethical value” or “legal value” there could be behind the charges now, and whether the whole exercise was designed to “manipulate U.S. public opinion to justify a military aggression against Cuba.”
The answer to why it took thirty years is not complicated: the United States government, through multiple administrations of both parties, lacked the political will to pursue accountability for the deliberate m*rder of four unarmed American civilians in international airspace. The Trump administration had the will. Rodriguez’s discomfort with the indictment of his government’s former leader is a measure of its significance, not evidence of its illegitimacy.
The Energy Blockade — And What It’s Already Accomplished
Rodriguez condemned what he called the “energy blockade” that the Trump administration imposed in January, which has caused massive blackouts across Cuba by cutting off the island’s oil supply. He characterized Rubio as “one of the main masterminds” behind it and said it has caused “significant humanitarian damage.”
The Cuban diplomat also made a strategically self-defeating argument against the blockade: if the Cuban state is already so inefficient and its economy so unviable, why would the most powerful country in the world need to issue executive orders imposing an energy blockade against it? “If the Cuban state would be an inefficient state, and the Cuban economy would not be viable, what would be the need?”
It is a fair question — and its honest answer is that the blockade is working. Cuba’s economy is contracting. The lights are off. The regime is under pressure it hasn’t experienced in decades. That is precisely the goal of economic pressure campaigns against authoritarian governments that have refused to democratize, free political prisoners, or respect the basic rights of their own people for sixty-seven years. Rodriguez’s anguish at the effectiveness of the blockade is not an argument for ending it. It is evidence that it is doing its job.
