Rubio warns Cuba after US indicts former leader

MIAMI – US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Cuba on May 21 that the US was laser-focused on changing the communist system, after the island was stunned by a US indictment of its former president Raul Castro.

The US military announced that the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and its escort warships had entered the Caribbean, although US President Donald Trump, asked if the deployment was meant to intimidate Cuba, said: “No, not at all.”

Mr Rubio, a Cuban American and vociferous opponent of Havana’s government, described the island 145km from the US shore as a “failed state” as it suffers a major economic crisis.

“Their economic system doesn’t work. It’s broken, and you can’t fix it with the current political system that’s in place,” Mr Rubio told reporters in Miami.

“What they’ve gotten used to all these years is just buying time and waiting us out,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to wait us out or buy time. We’re very serious. We’re very focused.”

Mr Rubio said that the US preference was “always a diplomatic solution” but warned that Mr Trump had other options at his disposal.

He also said Cuba had tentatively accepted an offer by the US of US$100 million (S$128 million) in aid in return for reforms.

But he said it was unclear if the US would accept Cuba’s terms, as Washington insists on circumventing the military-backed conglomerate GAESA, that dominates the island’s economy.

Earlier in May, Washington imposed sanctions on GAESA.

Mr Rubio said on May 21 that the GAESA chief’s Florida-based sister Adys Lastres Morera had been arrested and was being held by US immigration authorities.

In a post on social media platform X, he said she had been “managing real estate assets... while also aiding Havana’s communist regime, until I terminated her permanent resident status”.

Call for rally

The charges against Raul Castro – younger brother of Fidel Castro, the late iconic US nemesis who led Cuba’s communist revolution that culminated in 1959 – stem from the deadly downing of two civilian planes manned by anti-Castro pilots in 1996.

The Cuban authorities called on citizens to protest the “despicable” indictment, with the official newspaper Granma urging Cubans to gather outside the US embassy in Havana on May 22 at 7.30am local time (1230 GMT).

“This isn’t really an accusation, something from more than 30 years ago, but rather a public attack on a public figure,” Mr Fabian Fernandez, a 30-year-old accountant, told AFP in Havana.

Mr Trump in January seized on a US domestic indictment of Venezuela’s leftist leader Nicolas Maduro to send in US forces to depose him and take him into custody.

“The idea is to say, we can do to you what we did to Nicolas Maduro,” said senior fellow for Latin America Christopher Sabatini of Chatham House.

Economic crisis

The Maduro operation led to the end of free oil from Venezuela to Cuba, which relied on its ally for nearly half its needs.

Cubans have suffered power outages of up to 20 hours a day and taps running dry.

Runaway inflation has caused the price of basic goods to soar and mountains of trash have piled up on the streets of Havana.

In addition to murder, Castro has been charged with conspiracy to kill Americans and destruction of aircraft.

The Cuban government called the 1996 shootdown was “legitimate self-defence” against an airspace violation.

China and Russia both criticised Mr Trump’s steps on Cuba, which come as he tries to end an unpopular war he started with Israel against Iran.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a press briefing that Washington “should stop brandishing the sanctions stick and the judicial stick against Cuba and stop threatening force at every turn”.

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We believe that under no circumstances should such methods – which border on violence – be used against either former or current heads of state.” AFP