Cuba president says he’s ‘not stepping down’ in defiant NBC interview – National
In a nearly five-minute clip — part of a longer interview scheduled to air on Sunday — journalist Kristen Welker asked Díaz-Canel if he would be “willing to step down if it meant saving Cuba.”
Before answering, Díaz-Canel, 65, asked Welker if she had ever posed that question to any other president in the world.
He asked: “Is that a question from you, or is that coming from the State Department of the U.S. government?”
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“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. 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,” Díaz-Canel said.
“The concept of revolutionaries giving up and stepping down – it’s not part of our vocabulary.”
Díaz-Canel said he became president not out of a “personal ambition or corporate ambition or even a party ambition,” but because of a mandate by the people.
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“If the Cuban people understand that I am not fit for office, that I have no reason to be here, then I should not be holding this position of president; I will respond to them,” he said.
Díaz-Canel also accused the U.S. government of implementing a “hostile policy” against Cuba and said it has “no moral to demand anything from Cuba.”
“I think the most important thing would be for them to understand and take this critical position, a sincere position, and recognize how much it has cost the Cuban people — and how much they have deprived the American people from a normal relationship with the Cuban people,” he added.
Díaz-Canel said Cuba is interested in engaging in dialogue and discussing any topic without conditions, “not demanding changes from our political system as we are not demanding change from the American system, about which we have a number of doubts.”
The Cuban president’s comments come as tensions between Cuba and the U.S. remain high. U.S. President Donald Trump called Cuba a “failing nation” last month, and said he’ll have “the honour of taking Cuba” soon.
In February, Trump also said the U.S. was in talks with Havana and raised the possibility of “a friendly takeover,” without sharing details on what that meant.
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” Trump said. “They have no money. They have no anything right now. But they’re talking to us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
In response to Díaz-Canel’s comments Thursday, a White House official said the Trump administration is talking to Cuba and claimed that leaders of the country “want to make a deal and should make a deal.”
“Cuba is a failing nation whose rulers have had a major setback with the loss of support from Venezuela,” the White House official said to NBC News on Thursday.
Last month, Trump said he could soon strike a deal with Cuba or take other action, following protests in the island nation’s capital as its population faces rolling blackouts, fuel shortages and economic turmoil.
Díaz-Canel confirmed that the country was in talks with the U.S.
“These talks have been aimed at finding solutions through dialogue to the bilateral differences we have between the two nations,” Díaz-Canel said in a video aired on state television, adding that he hoped the negotiations would move the adversaries “away from confrontation.”
Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, Cuba’s deputy prime minister, said in an interview in Havana that “Cuba is open to having a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies” and “also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants.”
— With files from Global News’ Rachel Goodman and The Associated Press
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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