Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel delivers a welcome speech to members of the “Nuestra America,” or Our America Convoy on the Conference Palace in Havana, Cuba, Friday, March 20, 2026.
Adalberto Roque/Pool picture through AP
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Adalberto Roque/Pool picture through AP
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel informed NBC Information’ Meet the Press that he wouldn’t step down in his first interview with a U.S. community, a portion of which was broadcast Thursday.
In an almost five-minute clip that’s a part of an extended interview scheduled to air on Sunday, journalist Kristen Welker requested Díaz-Canel if he could be “willing to step down if it meant saving Cuba. “
Earlier than answering, Díaz-Canel requested if she had ever posed that query to some other president on the planet: “Is that a question from you, or is that coming from the State Department of the U.S. government?”
Díaz-Canel added: “In Cuba, the people who are in leadership position 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.”
He stated he turned president not out of a “personal ambition or corporate ambition or even a party ambition,” however due to a mandate by the folks.
“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 stated.
The interview comes as tensions between Cuba and the U.S. stay excessive regardless of either side acknowledging talks, though no particulars have been shared.
Díaz-Canel accused the U.S. authorities of implementing a “hostile policy” towards Cuba and stated it has “no moral to demand anything from Cuba.”
He stated the U.S. ought to acknowledge how a lot the insurance policies have price the Cuban folks “and how much they have deprived the American people from a normal relationship with the Cuban people.”
Díaz-Canel famous that Cuba is considering partaking in dialogue and discussing any subject with out circumstances, “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.”
Cuba blames a U.S. vitality blockade for its deepening woes, with a scarcity of petroleum affecting the island’s well being system, public transportation and the manufacturing of products and providers.
In late March, a Russian tanker carrying 730,000 barrels of crude oil arrived in Cuba, marking the island’s first oil cargo in three months. Russia has promised to ship a second tanker.
Regardless of threatening tariffs in early January on international locations that promote or present oil to Cuba, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump allowed the tanker to proceed.
“Cuba’s finished,” Trump stated on the time. “They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership and whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.”
Cuba produces solely 40% of the gasoline it consumes, and it stopped receiving key oil shipments from Venezuela after the U.S. attacked the South American nation in early January and arrested its then chief.
