US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio

by  Roberto Morejón

  The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is no stranger to outbursts against Cuba, but one of his most recent stands out for its stupidity, omissions and disregard for reality.

 The former Republican senator, who claims to be an expert on the largest of the Antilles despite never having set foot in the country, described the governments of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua as "enemies of humanity", the cause, he said, of the migratory crisis in the region.

 It is striking to attribute to Cuba such dimensions, power and influence as to "threaten" humanity.

 The head of the Foreign Ministry is accused of being ignorant of the migratory flows that cross Latin America.

 He tries to convince us that the march of Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Ecuadorians, Colombians, Haitians, Afghans, Asians and Africans towards the United States is a fiction.

 But the close collaborator of the corrupt Robert Menendez, who lives so far away from Cuba that he interprets everything in a poisonous way, together with Mauricio Claver Carone, led the first administration of Donald Trump to give a twist to the blockade.

Now, along with the gang of legislators of alleged Cuban origin, he is announcing a new battery of sanctions that he says will hurt the regime if they target the people.

 On January 20, Trump made clear the official stance recommended by Rubio and the other anti-Cuban members of his team and revoked President Joseph Biden's order removing the Caribbean nation from the list of countries that, according to Washington's reading, promote terrorism.

As a result, greater export controls have been reinstated, as well as obstacles to foreign aid and banking transactions.

And the fact is that the one who once challenged Trump himself- the one who gave him the nickname "little Marco" to ridicule him when they faced each other in the 2016 presidential primaries --- has been reluctant to engage in exchanges with Havana and today claims, without evidence, that it harbors terrorism.

He is doing so when some might expect him, in his position as head of diplomacy, to be a man of reason.

Cubans do not fall into this trap. They know that he is in favor of what he calls a firm stance towards the archipelago, which translates into suffocation.

 The man who arrived in Congress in 2010 and who sits on the strategic committees is a hawk and applauds the fact that his boss is offering "peace through force". 

An admirer of right-wing leaders, it is no coincidence that at the end of January he announced the decision to restore a harsh policy towards Cuba, including obstacles to the sending of remittances.

  Rubio, one of China's most vocal critics, likes the outrages against Cuba, the same ones that will provoke greater shortages, separations and emigration.

 Exactly the opposite of what the Trump administration claims to be seeking.