The US president has turned his ire on Caribbean island nation just days after his forces kidnapped Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro
US President Donald Trump has someone in mind to be the next leader of Cuba – his secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
On Sunday, Trump reposted an image of an X post that jokingly claimed that the top US diplomat would be made the president of the Caribbean island.
“Sounds good to me!” Trump responded on Truth Social.
In a follow-up message, he accused Cuba of subsisting on oil money from Venezuela.
The latter country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, was kidnapped by US special forces last week following months of pressure from Washington, after which Trump demanded “total access” to the South American nation’s oil. A number of Cubans in Maduro’s personal security team were killed in the raid.
In his Truth Social post, Trump confirmed that “most of those Cubans are DEAD” and the US will now “protect” Venezuela and urged Havana to “make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
Just hours later, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel decried Washington’s assumed moral superiority and accused it of “attacking” Cuba for 66 years.
“Those who turn everything into a business, even human lives, have no moral authority to point fingers at Cuba on anything, absolutely anything,” he wrote on X.
The island nation’s “severe economic shortages” are the fault of “the draconian measures of extreme strangulation that the US has been applying to us for six decades,” he said.
Washington has maintained a comprehensive trade embargo of the Caribbean nation since the 1960s. While the Obama and Biden administrations took steps to normalize relations, after his reelection last January, Trump reinstated Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.