Cuba’s leader vows ‘unbreakable resistance’ if US tries to take over island

2026.03.18 05:20 A street in Havana, as power was being restored on Tuesday. Photo: Reuters Cuba’s leader on Tuesday said the US would face “unbreakable resistance” if it tries to take over the impoverished island nation, as communist authorities scrambled to fix a nationwide electricity blackout. Cuba’s government has been under increasingly crushing pressure, with Washington enforcing an oil blockade and openly stating it wants to end the nearly seven-decade-old US stand-off with the one-party communist state. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Cuba’s decision announced this week to let exiles invest and own businesses did not go far enough to allow free-market reforms that the Trump administration demands. “What they announced yesterday is not dramatic enough. It’s not going to fix it. So they’ve got some big decisions to make,” Rubio, a Cuban-American and vociferous critic of the country’s ruling party, told reporters at the White House. Havana as power was being restored on Tuesday. Photo: Reuters US President Donald Trump, who has heaped pressure on Cuba’s communist government, said Monday he would “take” Cuba, adding: “We’ll be doing something with Cuba very soon”. But his Cuban counterpart Miguel Diaz-Canel was defiant in the face of Washington’s threats. “Faced with the worst-case scenario, Cuba has one guarantee: any external aggressor will encounter an unbreakable resistance,” he wrote in a statement on X. Cuba was open to broad talks with Washington and allowing more investment, but it will not discuss changing its political system, an envoy told Agence France-Presse on Tuesday. Tanieris Dieguez, Cuba’s deputy chief of mission in Washington, said the two neighbouring countries “have a lot of things to put on the table” but that neither should ask the other to change its government. “Nothing related with our political system, nothing with our political model - our constitutional model - is part of the negotiations, and never will it be part of that,”

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