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 carry out a military attack against the island or to attempt to depose him.
He said an invasion of Cuba would be costly and affect regional security, but should it happen, Cubans would defend themselves — even if it meant losing their lives in the process.
“If the time comes, I don’t think there would be any justification for the United States to launch a military aggression against Cuba, or for the U.S. to undertake a surgical operation or the kidnapping of a president,” Díaz-Canel said, speaking through a translator.
“If that happens, there will be fighting, and there will be a struggle, and we will defend ourselves, and if we need to die, we’ll die, because as our national anthem says, ‘Dying for the homeland is to live.’
“Before making that decision, which is so irrational, there is a logic, that is, the logic of dialogue, to engage in discussions, to debate and try to reach agreements that would 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., such as releasing political prisoners and scheduling multi-party elections.
“Nobody has made those demands to us, and we have established that in respect to our political system or constitutional order, these are issues that are not under negotiations with the United States,” Díaz-Canel responded.
When Welker pressed Díaz-Canel on the topic 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 are not in favour of the revolution “and manifest themselves on a daily basis” who are 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 big lie, that’s a slander, and that’s part of that construct in order to vilify and to engage a character assassination of the Cuban Revolution,” Díaz-Canel said, without answering about Osorbo.
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In a portion of the interview shared on Thursday, Welker asked Díaz-Canel if he would be “willing to step down if it meant saving Cuba.”
Before answering, Díaz-Canel asked Welker if she had ever posed that question to any other president in the world.
He asked: “Is that a question from you, or is that coming from the State Department of the U.S. government?”
“In Cuba, the people who are in leadership positions are not elected by the U.S. government, and they don’t have a mandate from the U.S. government. We have a free sovereign state, a free state. We have self-determination and independence, and we are not subjected to the designs of the United States,” Díaz-Canel said.
“The concept of revolutionaries giving up and stepping down – it’s not part of our vocabulary.”
Díaz-Canel said he became president not out of a “personal ambition or corporate ambition or even a party ambition,” but because of a mandate by the people.
“If the Cuban people understand that I am not fit for office, that I have no reason to be here, then I should not be holding this position of president; I will respond 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 think the most important thing would be for them to understand and take this critical position, a sincere position, and recognize how much it has cost the Cuban people — and how much they have deprived the American people from a normal relationship with the Cuban people,” he added.
Díaz-Canel said Cuba is interested in engaging in dialogue and discussing any topic without conditions, “not demanding changes from our political system as we are not demanding change from the American system, about which we have a number of 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 “want to make a deal and should make a deal.”
“Cuba is a failing nation whose rulers have had a major setback with the loss 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 possibility of “a friendly takeover,” without sharing details on what that meant.
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” Trump said. “They have no money. They have no anything right now. But they’re talking to us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Last month, Trump said he could soon strike a deal with Cuba or take other action, following protests in 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 at finding solutions through dialogue to the bilateral differences we have between the two 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 commercial relationship with U.S. companies” and “also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants.”
— With files from Global News’ Rachel Goodman and The Associated Press
