Cuba’s Diaz-Canel vows to resist US pressure to resign as Trump escalates threats, tightens oil blockade on the island.
Published On 10 Apr 2026
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel says he will not bow to pressure by the United States to resign.
“Stepping down is not part of our vocabulary,” he said in an interview with US broadcaster NBC News on Thursday.
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The president described communist-ruled Cuba as a “free sovereign state” with the right to “self-determination,” adding that the island is not “subject to the designs of the United States”.
“In Cuba, the people who are in leadership positions are not elected by the US government,” he said.
The president since 2018 faces increasing pressure and demands for regime change from President Donald Trump’s administration.
Trump has hinted that Cuba could face the same fate as Venezuela and Iran.
“I built this great military. I said, ‘You’ll never have to use it.’ But sometimes you have to use it. And Cuba is next,” the US president said last month.
Cuba’s main oil supply was cut off after Trump ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January. The US has since imposed an oil blockade on the island and threatened tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba.
‘Hostile policy’
Diaz-Canel condemned the US “hostile policy” that has left Cuba reeling from widespread power blackouts, fuel shortages and disruptions to water and food distribution.
He also said the Trump administration has “deprived the American people from a normal relationship with Cuba.”
Since returning to office last year, Trump has labelled Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security and threatened a “takeover” of the island.
Current tensions stretch back to the Cold War, when the US took an adversarial stance against left-wing governments across the Americas.
The Cuban Revolution in the 1950s led to the overthrow of a US-backed military government. By the early 1960s, Washington had imposed a comprehensive trade embargo aimed at weakening revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.
‘We cannot betray Cuba’
Despite US pressure, Russia has remained a close ally of Cuba.
“We cannot betray Cuba. That is out of the question. We cannot leave it on its own,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said at a news conference in Havana on Friday.
Last month, a Russia-flagged tanker carrying 730,000 barrels of oil docked in Cuba – the first to reach the island in three months.
