US Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered Cubans what he called a "new path" in relations with Washington on Wednesday, while bypassing Cuba's communist government and promising $100 million in humanitarian aid for the island.
"In the US we are ready to open a new chapter in the relationship between our people and our countries," Rubio, whose parents emigrated from Cuba to the United States, said in a video message in Spanish released on Cuba's Independence Day.
Rubio said the proposed relationship should be built directly with the Cuban people rather than with the communist government in Havana.
Amid worsening shortages of food, medicine and fuel on the Caribbean island, Rubio said Washington was prepared to provide $100 million in aid. He added that any supplies would have to be distributed through the Catholic Church or humanitarian organizations and not through the military-run conglomerate GAESA, which controls large parts of Cuba's economy.
"President Trump is offering a new path between the US and a new Cuba," Rubio said. "A new Cuba where you, the ordinary Cuban, and not just GAESA, can own a gas station or a clothing store, or a restaurant ... A new Cuba where you, and not just the Communist Party of Cuba, can own a television station or a newspaper."
Rubio released the message on Cuba's Independence Day, which marks the founding of the republic on May 20, 1902, after four years of US occupation.
Cuba's communist leadership, which came to power after the 1959 revolution, has long rejected the pre-revolution republic and its US-backed governments.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel criticized Rubio's remarks in a post on X, saying the date symbolized "intervention, interference, dispossession, frustration" in Cuba's history.
"There is only one thing to be grateful for from that day: having sown in the Cubans of that time an anti-imperialist sentiment that every subsequent generation has felt deepen with new and constant threats to the independence and sovereignty of the homeland," Díaz-Canel wrote.
