On Wednesday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Briefing,” MS NOW Political Contributor Ben Rhodes said, “I’m not here to defend the Cuban government, but the reality is, the scarcity in Cuba is not because its leaders stole some money from the people. It’s because there’s been an embargo for decades that denies basic goods and denies Cuba access to the international financial system,” and criticized “The absurdity of indicting a 94-year-old man for something that happened more than 30 years ago, is that tough to go send some Delta Force guys to grab a 94-year-old man who’s not even the president of Cuba anymore?”
While discussing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s video on Cuba, Rhodes said, “Look, I’m not here to defend the Cuban government, but the reality is, the scarcity in Cuba is not because its leaders stole some money from the people. It’s because there’s been an embargo for decades that denies basic goods and denies Cuba access to the international financial system, and because there’s been a full blockade on Cuba for months, which has denied them fuel, which has led to power shortages, which has killed people, because if you cut off power to hospitals, people die, and children are malnourished. Second, the absurdity of him talking about the corruption of billions of dollars being stolen at the same time that Donald Trump, his family, and his cronies have been looting, literally, the American treasury or leveraging American power to get billions of dollars in crypto companies. Nobody believes that this is some earnest anti-corruption agenda. And, then, lastly, do we really think these people are credible in delivering messages about human rights and democracy as they dismantle human rights and democracy at home? No. So, this is about power. This is about treating the Western Hemisphere like our empire.”
He added that the push against Cuba’s regime is “about settling a score with the Castro family for something that happened in the late 1950s, and, actually, bluntly, it’s also about real estate. It’s about who’s going to be able to develop beachfront property in Cuba or Miami Cubans that want to get claims of land that they owned in the 1950s before the Cuban Revolution. And the question is, do we really want to risk what could go on with a military conflict in terms of loss of life, here and in Cuba? Do we really want to risk or spend billions of dollars to have aircraft carriers and other military assets participate in this? The absurdity of indicting a 94-year-old man for something that happened more than 30 years ago, is that tough to go send some Delta Force guys to grab a 94-year-old man who’s not even the president of Cuba anymore?”
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