Transcript: NPR's Full Interview With Sen. Marco Rubio
Transcript: NPR's Full Interview With Sen. Marco Rubio
NPR: You scheduled an announcement at Miami's Freedom Tower, which has historic significance because Cubans who fled Fidel Castro's regime in the 60s and 70s received federal aid there. This brings to mind that you have strongly criticized President Obama's restoration of relations with Cuba. If you're elected, would you reverse that policy?
RUBIO: Absolutely, and I think the reason why is because I'm interested in, my interest in Cuba is freedom and democracy. I think the Cuban people, they are free, have the right to choose any economic model they want to follow. I don't believe these changes will actually further democracy. In fact, I think they will make it harder to achieve. The goal of the Castro regime is to create the impression and the reality that their form of government is a legitimate form of government and set it in concrete. They know they have a generational challenge. Most of their top leaders are in their 80s. The actuarial tables tell you they don't have much longer. And they want to leave in place global recognition for this form of government so that it can continue in perpetuity. And that means the Cuban people will never have the chance to experience what the people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti have, what the people in Mexico have, what the people in Peru have, what the people in Colombia have, which is free and fair elections. And that's all I want for the people in Cuba. And I think U.S. policy towards Cuba is a major leverage point that we can use to help the Cuban people achieve freedom for themselves.
NPR: But help me think through this. The president made this announcement, they're working on getting an embassy going at some point in the future. He went to Summit of the Americas where other countries in Latin America very much welcomed the restoration of relations. You're saying that if you're elected, you would close that embassy, you would break diplomatic ties, you would go back to the way things were?
RUBIO: We have an interest section in Cuba and it will continue to operate, but an embassy, I'm not, I don't believe this country should be diplomatically recognizing a nation of the nature of Cuba. Obviously there are other dictatorships in the world that we have relations with by geopolitical reality. You know, China's the largest country in the world, the second largest economy, the second largest military force. There are geopolitical realities there. Cuba is a brutal, tyrannical dictatorship 90 miles from the shore of our country. It is a nation that helps North Korea evade U.N. weapon sanctions. It is a country that harbors fugitives from American justice, including Medicare fraudsters and someone who killed a police officer in the United States. And I just think that we should have continued with the policy and perhaps looked for new ways of — continue with the policy of not recognizing that regime and not allowing them access to economic growth that would allow them to perpetuate themselves in power, and continue to search for ways to provide the Cuban people with more information about the reality of the world so they would be empowered to eventually create for themselves a democratic society.
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here.
Rubio would reverse the President's policy changes re Cuba. He clearly said so himself.
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