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Cuba’s leader Miguel Díaz-Canel sparred with NBC News’ Kristen Welker in an interview on Thursday as the “Meet the Press” host questioned whether he would be “willing to step down if it meant saving Cuba.”
“You are a very important journalist,” Díaz-Canel responded via an interpreter. “Have you ever asked that question to any other president in the world?”
Welker noted that him stepping down was one of the conditions the United States has raised in diplomatic negotiations with the island nation.
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After Díaz-Canel repeated his question, Welker replied, “I asked very tough questions to our own president.”
He then asked, “Do you ask that question to Trump?”
Welker said she asked tough questions of President Donald Trump as Díaz-Canel responded, “Is that a question from you or is that coming from the State Department of the U.S. government?”
The NBC News host asked again, reiterating that political change in Cuba was one of the conditions brought up by the U.S. government.
“In Cuba, the people who are in leadership positions are not elected by the U.S. government, and they don’t have a mandate from the U.S. government,” Díaz-Canel said. “We have a free sovereign state, a free state. We have self-determination and independence, and we are not subjected to the designs of the United States.”
“We are elected by the people, although there’s a narrative trying to disregard that,” he told Welker. “Anyone of us, before we become part of a leadership role, we need to be elected at the grassroots level in an electoral district by thousands of Cubans. And then those who represent the Cubans at the National Assembly of People’s Power elect those leadership positions and those offices, like it happens in many other countries around the world.”
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Cuba operates under a single-party socialist framework that prohibits the existence of organized political opposition. Although local elections are held to fill the National Assembly, the requirement that all candidates belong to the Communist Party leads human rights groups and political analysts to dismiss the process, as there is no true opposition.
The country’s leader said the U.S. had no right to “demand anything from Cuba.”
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
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Díaz-Canel said in March that the country was in talks with the Trump administration. He said in a broadcast by Cuba’s state media that talks with Washington were aimed at finding solutions to the political differences that divide the communist island and the United States.
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