MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. — Cuban exiles expressed strong opposition on Thursday to the island’s communist leaders’ recent invitation to invest in businesses or partner with the state.
Along Bird Road, across from Tropical Park, in Miami-Dade County’s Westchester neighborhood, one of about a dozen protesters on Thursday wore a “Make Cuba Great Again” baseball cap. Some held “Cuba Freedom First, Business Later” signs.
José Daniel Ferrer, a Cuban dissident who arrived in U.S. exile in October, met with members of The Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, who have been pushing for political change in Cuba.
“I think in Cuba people want freedom, they want liberation,” Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat said on Thursday.
Also on Thursday, Gen. Francis Donovan, who heads U.S. Southern Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Donovan said officers are tracking a Russian destroyer with an oil cargo ship on its way to Cuba and denied any preparations for a U.S. military intervention in Cuba.
President Donald Trump recently told reporters that he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” soon. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said there will be resistance.
Trump and Díaz-Canel have both acknowledged U.S.-Cuba talks after Trump cut the flow of oil to Cuba from Venezuela and Mexico. Trump later announced that U.S. companies will be allowed to send fuel to private businesses in Cuba.
“The reason why those industries have not flourished in Cuba is because the regime has not allowed them to flourish,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said about Cuba’s small private sector.
There have also been small protests on the island as Cubans deal with fuel shortages, power outages, and unemployment.
Despite a painful history of expropriations and the risk of corruption that comes with a one-party system, a 54-year-old great-nephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro used state-owned media to ask the Cuban diaspora to invest in the communist island.
Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, Cuba’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign trade and foreign investment, is the grandson of Ángela “Angelita” Castro, the late sister of Fidel and Raúl Castro, and the son of their niece Mirsa Fraga Castro, a biologist.
On Tuesday, after an island-wide power outage in Cuba, the Cuban Embassy in the U.S. shared a video on YouTube showing Pérez-Oliva Fraga, an electronics engineer, on “Mesa Redonda” or “Round Table,” a state-media talk show.
“We are opening up the participation of the community of Cubans living abroad,” Pérez-Oliva Fraga said in Spanish about the island’s new economic reforms, which would benefit from the end of the U.S. trade embargo.
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