Cuba, desperate for US thaw, files formal note of protest

BY RAFAEL BERNAL THEHILL.COM
UPDATED MARCH 19, 2024 2:17 AM

Cuban officials are pushing every button at their disposal to get the Biden administration's attention, offering talks on previously off-the-table issues such as human rights amid internal protests over its worst economic crisis since the end of the Cold War. Havana is also lighting diplomatic fires, ratcheting up accusations of U.S. interventionism and callousness in the face of human suffering on the island.

Cuban Vice Minister of Foreign Relations Carlos Fernández de Cossío on Monday called U.S. Chargé d'Affaires Benjamin Ziff to deliver a diplomatic note of protest rejecting "the interventionist conduct and slanderous messages of the United States government and its embassy in Cuba regarding internal affairs of the Cuban reality."

State Department spokesman Vedant Patel on Monday told reporters "the United States is not behind these protests in Cuba, and the accusation of that is absurd."

The communist government, once hopeful President Biden would reverse some of former President Trump's most stringent restrictions on Cuba - namely the state sponsor of terror designation - is now playing formerly withheld cards, but Cuban officials say the U.S. is not picking up the phone.

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