Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said the island “will defend ourselves” against a U.S. invasion in an interview on NBC News’ Meet the Press on Sunday.
Díaz-Canel, 65, said the U.S. has no valid reason to perform a military attack against the island or to try and depose him.
He said an invasion of Cuba can be costly and affect regional security, but should it occur, Cubans would defend themselves — even when it meant losing their lives in the method.
“If the time comes, I don’t think there can be any justification for the US to launch a military aggression against Cuba, or for the U.S. to undertake a surgical treatment or the kidnapping of a president,” Díaz-Canel said, speaking through a translator.
“If that happens, there might be fighting, and there might be a struggle, and we are going to defend ourselves, and if we’d like to die, we’ll die, because as our national anthem says, ‘Dying for the homeland is to live.’
“Before making that call, which is so irrational, there may be a logic, that’s, the logic of dialogue, to interact in discussions, to debate and take a look at to succeed in agreements that will move us away from confrontation.”
Journalist Kristen Welker asked Díaz-Canel whether he was willing to commit to responding to “key demands” from the U.S., corresponding to releasing political prisoners and scheduling multi-party elections.
“No one has made those demands to us, and now we have established that in respect to our political system or constitutional order, these are issues that should not under negotiations with the US,” Díaz-Canel responded.
When Welker pressed Díaz-Canel on the subject of political prisoners, and specifically named Cuban rapper Maykel Osorbo, who has been in prison since 2021 for writing a protest song, the president said there are people in Cuba who should not in favour of the revolution “and manifest themselves every day” who should not in prison.
“This narrative that has been created, that image that anyone who speaks against a revolution is thrown into jail, that’s a giant lie, that’s a slander, and that’s a part of that construct with the intention to vilify and to interact a personality assassination of the Cuban Revolution,” Díaz-Canel said, without answering about Osorbo.
Get each day National news
Get each day Canada news delivered to your inbox so you will never miss the day’s top stories.
In a portion of the interview shared on Thursday, Welker asked Díaz-Canel if he can be “willing to step down if it meant saving Cuba.”
Before answering, Díaz-Canel asked Welker if she had ever posed that query to another president on the earth.
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 should not elected by the U.S. government, they usually don’t have a mandate from the U.S. government. We now have a free sovereign state, a free state. We now have self-determination and independence, and we should not subjected to the designs of the US,” 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.
“If the Cuban people understand that I’m not fit for office, that I even have no reason to be here, then I mustn’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 his country and said it has “no moral to demand anything from Cuba.”
“I believe a very powerful thing can be for them to know 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 traditional relationship with the Cuban people,” he added.
Díaz-Canel said Cuba is focused on engaging in dialogue and discussing any topic without conditions, “not demanding changes from our political system as we should not demanding change from the American system, about which now we have various doubts.”
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.
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 opportunity of “a friendly takeover,” without sharing details on what that meant.
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” Trump said. “They don’t have any money. They don’t have any anything without delay. But they’re talking to us, and perhaps we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
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 geared toward finding solutions through dialogue to the bilateral differences now we have 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. firms” and “also with Cubans residing in the US and their descendants.”
— With files from Global News’ Rachel Goodman and The Associated Press