Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Thursday that while Havana does not seek confrontation, it will prepare to prevent one and, if necessary, prevail. “We don’t want that [confrontation] but it is our duty to be ready to avoid it… and if it were unavoidable, to win it,” he told thousands in Havana.
The remarks came during a ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA-backed operation launched after Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionaries nationalized U.S.-owned properties and businesses on the island. Díaz-Canel used the occasion to warn that Cuba is “ready” for another attack amid escalating rhetoric from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Relations between the United States and Cuba have been hostile since Cuba’s 1959 revolution, and the Trump administration has invoked elements of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine aimed at limiting outside influence in the Western Hemisphere. Late last year the U.S. dispatched warships to the Caribbean to target what it described as drug-smuggling boats. In January, Trump cited the doctrine when the U.S. military arrested Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and extradited him to the U.S. to face drug-trafficking charges. After Maduro’s abduction, Trump imposed an oil and gas blockade on Cuba and warned that “Cuba’s next.” Following a U.S. war against Iran on February 28, Trump reportedly again raised the idea of “taking” Cuba — a nation that has also suffered widespread blackouts which Havana attributes to the U.S. energy blockade.
Díaz-Canel called the situation “very grave,” invoked the socialist legacy of Fidel Castro and rejected claims that Cuba is failing. “Cuba is not a failed state. Cuba is a besieged state,” he said, accusing the U.S. of seeking a pretext for intervention and describing Cuba as facing “multidimensional aggression: economic warfare, an intensified blockade and an energy blockade.”
Officials from both sides have held recent talks intended to ease tensions, though few details have been released. The U.S. trade embargo imposed after the revolution remains in place nearly seven decades later.
Edited by: Wesley Dockery