Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said he wouldn’t step down in his first interview with a U.S. network for NBC News’ Meet the Press, which broadcast a portion of the interview on Thursday.
In a virtually five-minute clip — a part of an extended interview scheduled to air on Sunday — journalist Kristen Welker asked Díaz-Canel if he could be “willing to step down if it meant saving Cuba.”
Before answering, Díaz-Canel, 65, asked Welker if she had ever posed that query to another president on this planet.
He asked: “Is that an issue from you, or is that coming from the State Department of the U.S. government?”
“In Cuba, the people who find themselves in leadership positions aren’t elected by the U.S. government, they usually don’t have a mandate from the U.S. government. We’ve got a free sovereign state, a free state. We’ve got self-determination and independence, and we aren’t subjected to the designs of america,” Díaz-Canel said.
“The concept of revolutionaries giving up and stepping down – it’s not a part of our vocabulary.”
Díaz-Canel said he became president not out of a “personal ambition or corporate ambition or perhaps a party ambition,” but due to a mandate by the people.
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“If the Cuban people understand that I’m not fit for office, that I actually have no reason to be here, then I shouldn’t be holding this position of president; I’ll reply to them,” he said.
Díaz-Canel also accused the U.S. government of implementing a “hostile policy” against Cuba and said it has “no moral to demand anything from Cuba.”
“I believe a very powerful thing could be for them to grasp and take this critical position, a sincere position, and recognize how much it has cost the Cuban people — and the way much they’ve deprived the American people from a standard relationship with the Cuban people,” he added.
Díaz-Canel said Cuba is enthusiastic about engaging in dialogue and discussing any topic without conditions, “not demanding changes from our political system as we aren’t demanding change from the American system, about which we have now numerous doubts.”
The Cuban president’s comments come as tensions between Cuba and the U.S. remain high. U.S. President Donald Trump called Cuba a “failing nation” last month, and said he’ll have “the honour of taking Cuba” soon.
In February, Trump also said the U.S. was in talks with Havana and raised the potential of “a friendly takeover,” without sharing details on what that meant.
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” Trump said. “They haven’t any money. They haven’t any anything straight away. But they’re talking to us, and perhaps we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
In response to Díaz-Canel’s comments Thursday, a White House official said the Trump administration is talking to Cuba and claimed that leaders of the country “have the desire to make a deal and may make a deal.”
“Cuba is a failing nation whose rulers have had a significant setback with the lack of support from Venezuela,” the White House official said to NBC News on Thursday.
Last month, Trump said he could soon strike a take care of Cuba or take other motion, following protests within the island nation’s capital as its population faces rolling blackouts, fuel shortages and economic turmoil.
Díaz-Canel confirmed that the country was in talks with the U.S.
“These talks have been aimed toward finding solutions through dialogue to the bilateral differences we have now between the 2 nations,” Díaz-Canel said in a video aired on state television, adding that he hoped the negotiations would move the adversaries “away from confrontation.”
Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, Cuba’s deputy prime minister, said in an interview in Havana that “Cuba is open to having a fluid business relationship with U.S. corporations” and “also with Cubans residing in america and their descendants.”
— With files from Global News’ Rachel Goodman and The Associated Press
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