Cuban foreign minister says Rubio’s ‘personal’ agenda in Latin America risks Trump’s peace prospects

NEW YORK (AP) – Recent U.S. 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 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 The Associated Press 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 U.S. in order to advance this very extremist approach.”

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

“The U.S. 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 U.S. 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 criticizing 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 U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Trump moved the country back to the list the day after his inauguration. The U.S. 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 labor.”

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 U.S. 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.

The lobbying for further U.S. intervention in Latin America, which has defined much of Rubio’s quarter-century in politics, was on stark display recently when the U.S. dispatched a fleet of American warships into the waters off Venezuela after ordering back-to-back fatal strikes on alleged drug boats.

Rodríguez said that Cuba has acted in “full solidarity” with Venezuela and warned that the unusual naval buildup off South America and speculation that Trump could try to topple Maduro “could bring about unforeseeable and catastrophic consequences.” The Trump administration has said it is trying to force Cuba to stop supporting Maduro, who the U.S. says receives military and intelligence help from the Cubans.

When asked if Cuba would support Venezuela militarily if an invasion were to happen, he demurred, saying, “We do not know what the future can bring.”

But Rodríguez expressed optimism about the prospects of a less adversarial relationship with its northern neighbor and said officials continue to cooperate with Washington on several bilateral agreements, including on counterterrorism and migration.

He added, “We are fully willing, as we have always been, to begin right now, today, a serious and responsible dialogue with the current U.S. administration.”