Cuba is ‘willing to engage in dialogue with the US,’ says president Miguel Díaz-Canel

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Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel made it clear, amid ongoing tension with Washington, that “Cuba is willing to engage in dialogue with the United States,” a position that, according to him, was first defended by Fidel Castro and later by the latter’s brother Raúl. The president’s appearance this Thursday morning was his first televised address to the Cuban people since the arrest of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, after several weeks in which Cuban authorities had limited themselves to issuing rather moderate messages on the social platform X, where they had already made clear their willingness to engage in dialogue with U.S. officials.

However, the Cuban president insisted that any negotiation would take place “without pressure,” “without preconditions, on equal footing, with respect for our sovereignty, independence, and self-determination.”

“There are many things we can work on together, without prejudice,” insisted Díaz-Canel, who arrived at a press room dressed in black and stood on a platform next to a portrait of a young Fidel Castro. “How many things have we deprived both our peoples of because of this decadent, arrogant, criminal policy of blockade?” He also insisted that any dialogue would be aimed at “building a civilized relationship between neighbors that can bring mutual benefit to our peoples.”

Although U.S. President Donald Trump recently stated that his administration was already holding talks with Havana, Cuban authorities have denied this claim to date. In his speech on Thursday, Díaz-Canel did not mention whether they were already engaged in dialogue with the United States, but his deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, assured in an interview with the EFE news agency that “this dialogue has not begun.”

Díaz-Canel’s public appearance comes at a time of total uncertainty for the country, which has already begun to feel the effects of the shortage of the nearly 40,000 barrels of oil that used to arrive from Venezuela and the restrictions imposed on a supplier like Mexico. Lines to buy fuel stretch for kilometers across the island, gasoline sales on the black market have doubled, and power outages, already commonplace, have intensified, accumulating to more than 20 hours a day. According to the Cuban president, the rhetoric of the United States government continues to be based on “the theory of collapse,” betting on economic strangulation to promote the idea of ​​a “failed state.”

Certainly, the Republican administration has not given any indication of carrying out a military operation in Havana like the one it carried out in Caracas at the beginning of the month, but rather is betting on an economic strangulation of the regime, especially now that Trump has decreed a “national emergency” and imposed an increase in tariffs on goods from countries that supply oil to the island.

Díaz-Canel has responded to this situation with a rather vague concept that he has repeated at other times during the extreme crisis that the country has been experiencing for at least five years:“creative resistance,” which has basically meant more hunger and hardship for Cuban families. “I am not an idealist, I know that we are going to go through difficult times, but we are going to overcome them together, with creative resistance,” the president said on Thursday.