Rubio accuses Cuban officials of selling Venezuelan oil for cash that was ‘going into their pockets’

WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Cuban officials of selling Venezuelan oil for cash that was “going into their pockets.”

Rubio described the alleged corruption scheme during an interview with Fox News Radio on Wednesday. The U.S. Department of State released the transcript.

Nicolás Maduro was “stealing the oil of the people of Venezuela and giving it for free to Cuba. Cuba would take that oil, and they weren’t using it to benefit the Cuban people. They were selling the majority of that oil for cash, and that cash was going into their pockets,” Rubio told Brian Kilmeade, a political commentator with Fox News.

Rubio said the power outages have nothing to do with U.S. sanctions, but with Cuban officials’ mismanagement.

“These blackouts are not new; they’ve been having blackouts for five or seven years. You know why? Because their system doesn’t function; it doesn’t work. They have equipment from the 1940s and ’50s, and they haven’t re-upped it or invested in it at all, because the economic model doesn’t work,” Rubio told Kilmeade.

Rubio described the solution to U.S.-Cuba relations as codified in the federal law that established the U.S. embargo.

“Normalization between our countries cannot fully happen … unless there’s a functioning democracy, or at least steps towards a functioning democracy. So in many ways, when it comes to Cuba policy, it’s governed not simply by the desires of an administration; it’s governed by law,” Rubio said.

Miguel Díaz-Canel, who assumed the Cuban presidency in 2019, making him the island nation’s 17th president, has denied accusations of corruption and claimed that the U.S. has been waging “psychological warfare” and an “energy blockade” against the Cuban people.

Raúl Castro, who served as Cuba’s president for about a decade and as the defense minister for about 50 years, was hospitalized, according to sources in communication with Local 10 News Cuba Analyst Andy Gomez, the former director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban Studies.

Cuban officials remained silent on Wednesday after the Diario Las Américas, a Miami-based newspaper in Spanish, reported on Tuesday that Castro, 95, who formally retired in April 2021, had suffered a stroke and was on life support.

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