US Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered Cubans a “new path” in a special video address Wednesday hours before Washington was expected to criminally indict the island’s influential former leader Raul Castro.
Addressing the Cuban people directly in Spanish, Rubio accused the country’s communist leadership of theft, corruption and oppression.
“President (Donald) Trump is offering a new path between the US and a new Cuba,” said Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants.
“A new Cuba where you have a real opportunity to choose who governs your country and vote to replace them if they are not doing a good job.”
Tensions between Washington and Havana have spiked in recent months since US forces ousted Cuba’s regional ally Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in a military raid and then imposed a painful energy blockade on the already economically struggling island nation.
Trump has repeatedly signaled that the Cuban government could be next to fall, and earlier this month even said Washington would be “taking over” the Caribbean island, about 90 miles (145 km) from Florida, “almost immediately.”
“In the US, we are ready to open a new chapter in the relationship between our people and our countries,” Rubio said, according to an official English translation of his speech released by the State Department. “And, currently, the only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.”
In his speech on the day when the Cuban community in the United States marks the island’s independence, Rubio accused Gaesa, the military-backed conglomerate estimated to control 70 percent of the Cuban economy, of enriching the elites at the expense of ordinary citizens.
“A ‘state within the state’ that is accountable to no one and hoards the profits from its businesses for the benefit of a small elite,” Rubio charged. “And the only role played by the so-called ‘government’ is to demand that you continue making ‘sacrifices’ and repressing anyone who dares to complain.”
The US Justice Department was expected on Wednesday to announce criminal charges against 94-year-old Raul Castro, who succeeded his brother Fidel as president of Cuba and oversaw a historic 2015 rapprochement with the United States under Barack Obama that Trump later reversed.
According to US media reports, the indictment would focus on the 1996 downing of two civilian planes manned by anti-Castro pilots, that killed four people, and sent bilateral relations plummeting.
Four US Congress members expressed hope that the indictments will see justice served.
“We have a different President now, a president who is not willing to look the other way,” Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida told reporters during a press conference. “We expect that today justice has finally arrived.”
Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York added: “This a Communist regime that has brutally killed, tortured its people, and much of it was work of Raul Castro himself.”
“We hope this will be a turning point for the Cuban people,” she said.
While Cuban Americans on Wednesday marked Cuba’s independence, the Cuban government emphasizes different dates in its historical narrative, particularly the victory of Fidel Castro’s revolution on January 1, 1959.
“Intervention, interference, dispossession, frustration: that is what May 20th signifies in Cuba’s history,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in a post on X, referring to the Platt Amendment, an addendum to Cuba’s pre-communist constitution that allowed Washington to intervene militarily in Cuba.