Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío acknowledged on Tuesday that the communist regime is “concerned” about President-elect Donald Trump’s second term in January and the economic effects it could have on the cash-starved regime.
Fernández de Cossío delivered his remarks to reporters at an official regime event commemorating the tenth anniversary of the “Cuban Thaw,” a series of policies enacted by former U.S. President Barack Obama granting significant concessions to the Cuban communists.
The Castro regime also marked the occasion to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the return of the “Cuban Five,” a group of spies who infiltrated the Cuban exile community in the United States widely considered responsible for providing information to the Castro regime that led to its killing of four Americans in 1996.
“Of course we are concerned about the effect it may have on our economy, and in particular, the effect that further hostility from the U.S.,” Fernández de Cossío told reporters, “which has proven to be very powerful and to have a very effective destructive capacity to cause harm, may have on the standard of living of the population.”
According to Fernández de Cossío, the “most catastrophic” scenarios for Cuba are being planned following Trump’s re-election – which, he asserted, are scenarios “desired” by the Cuban diaspora in Florida. The communist official added that “it should not be in the interest of the American nation as a whole” that an increase in “instability and violence” materialize on the island. Fernández de Cossío further said he was convinced that the Castro regime will survive Trump’s second term.
“We know that we will be able to survive. In four years, the Trump government will be over and Cuba, socialist Cuba, will be here,” Fernández de Cossío said.
The Cuban deputy foreign minister recognized that the next four years may not be easy for the Castro regime as Cuba presently faces a dire humanitarian crisis and is on the brink of complete ruin — a direct result of more than six decades of disastrous communist policies that have wrought upon mass hunger, widespread shortages of medicine, the complete collapse of the nation’s power grid and other public infrastructure, and the ongoing collapse of Cuba’s population through the largest exodus of Cubans fleeing from communism in the country’s entire history.
Throughout the year, the Castro regime attempted to remedy the communist-made disaster with a series of “wartime economy” measures in a desperate effort to “save socialism.” By late November, the emergency measures appeared to have had no effect whatsoever in overturning Cuba’s dramatic situation — prompting the Castro regime to publicly beg its international sympathizers for funding in a gathering of communists in Paris, France.
Fernández de Cossío asserted that former President Obama’s “Cuban Thaw” policies were positive for both Cuba and the United States and were allegedly met with “euphoria” in both nations. The official also recounted the purported support of Cuban people’s “willingness to move forward” with “brief rapprochement” experienced through Obama’s policies despite the U.S. “embargo” being in place.
The Cuban deputy foreign minister accused Washington of failing to comply with “practically all” the commitments made with Cuba within Obama’s “thaw” framework — unlike Cuba, who, according to him, kept “all” of them instead — and stressed that since the rise of the Castro regime in 1959, “what has prevailed” on the United States’s part is “aggression.”
“In this difficult relationship there is an aggressor country and an aggressed country,” Fernández de Cossío claimed.
The communist official also lamented that the outgoing administration of U.S. President Joe Biden did not remove Cuba from the United States’ list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SST). Cuba first appeared on the list from 1982 to 2015 until former President Obama removed the designation from the island-nation as part of the “Cuban Thaw” policies.
President-elect Trump redesignated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism in January 2021 due to the Castro regime’s deep ties with international terrorist organizations such as the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hamas, Hezbollah, and Colombia’s FARC and ELN Marxist terrorist groups.
“The U.S. knows that Cuba does not sponsor terrorism. But it also knows perfectly well the damage it is capable of causing by keeping it on the list and that is the purpose it has pursued,” Fernández de Cossío said.
Although the outgoing-Biden administration has not changed Cuba’s SST designation at press time, it removed Cuba from the State Department’s list of countries “not cooperating fully” against terrorism on mid-May and granted a new concession package to the Castro regime later that month allowing supposed Cuban “independent private sector entrepreneurs” access to the United States banking system.
In 2022, the Biden administration reversed restrictions imposed by President-elect Trump in his first term that prevented Cuban military officials from funding its repressive apparatus through remittances sent to Cubans from abroad. A report published in early December by El Nuevo Herald revealed that the Castro regime availed itself of the rescinded restrictions to dupe the Biden administration into funding its military and evade sanctions imposed by President-elect Trump on the Cuban military.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
