9/15/26: Macklemore Dropped, Pablo Torre Returns, Cuban Official Interview

27:17That's what's going on there. Thank you very much, Pablo. As always, you remain literally the number one sports reporter in my book in the entire country. So we appreciate you very much. You guys are too kind anytime. And I think there'll be some more stories that I'll be excited to tell you about in the future. Looking forward to that. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything.

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30:53Yesterday, Ryan and I had a chance to sit down in studio with the deputy foreign minister of Cuba. He gave us an update on the humanitarian crisis in Cuba, how they are thinking about what the U.S. wants to do to them, and many other things, including his thoughts on the Miami-based Cuban-American expat community. Let's go ahead and take a look. We are very excited today to be joined by Cuba's Deputy Foreign Minister, Carlos Fernandez de Cosio. Really appreciate you being here. I know you don't get to the United States very often, but glad you could take some time to come by here. Thank you for having me in.

31:28Yeah, so I know the UN General Assembly is meeting next week, so I know you'll be having a lot of meetings up there. But the last time that I saw you was for an interview back in March in Havana. And while I was there, there were multiple blackouts, including one kind of nationwide blackout. I remember there were already millions of people without running water because of the embargo and the blockade. Afterwards, there was one Russian tanker that was allowed to come through. My understanding is that since then, there hasn't been any. There hasn't been any other. So that was March. You then had the, you know, the punishing Caribbean summer.

32:05What are the circumstances for people on the ground now that we're in September in Cuba and we're at almost a year of no oil getting into the country other than a shipment or two? To tell you, imagine having in the normal world in the 21st century, two to three hours of electricity per day. Imagine the impact for just cooling your food, for working, for reading, for watching television, for carrying out daily life, to cope with heat in the summer when you only have two to three hours of electricity. Then you could have spent weeks without the supply of water because as a result of lack of energy or lack of electricity, water is not being pumped.

32:58or you have a sick person at home with a chronic disease and you're not sure how you could take them to the hospital, an elderly person if you need to take them, if you're concerned that you have a newborn whose life is dependent on a machine that cannot stop and cannot suffer electrical failure, or you're going to surgery and it's postponed because there's no assurance of electricity, or if you're under surgery, it could be stopped because of a serious failure. And that's what we live today. The total blackouts that you speak about, we have several of those. During the summer, we had several of those.

33:37At the beginning of July, we had two in the same week. And that is unpredictable. We've been able to sustain it for some time. But the impact on life implies that people that should not have died have died. If you take the index of child mortality, which was a little over four per thousand newborns, gone up to nine, you can measure the amount of newborns that have died that should not have died in Cuba because we have a robust, naturally robust health system. And the aggression today is not only on fuel, it is only on the import of solar panels and anything linked to energy. What are some of the trade-offs that have had to be made at hospitals?

34:25What's the impact of schooling? What is the impact on businesses? Businesses are not working full hours. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there are people that have difficulty reaching, have to pay a lot of money to be able to go to work because there's no public transportation. And sometimes they reach and then there's a blackout. So they don't know if to stay, wait until electricity comes. And then in today's world, if you don't have electricity, it's very difficult to work. You don't have computers, you don't have systems at work. It's very difficult. There are people, for example, in tourism that earn a lot.

34:57And because tourism has been shut down, the U.S. has been putting pressure on every country so that there's no tourism. There are people that are losing their income. So there's a mass of working people in Cuba that have depressed incomes at a moment when there's inflation. The impact on public transportation, on taking kids to school. Yet we were able, on September 1st, to inaugurate the new school course. And I can assure you that in better conditions and better guarantees than most Latin American countries, and even some communities in the United States, for close to 1.5 million children, a lot of effort.

35:34It's done under harsh conditions. Kids go to school with difficulty with public transportation. It's practically impossible to give them school lunch. And teachers have to work without electricity, without a fan, under heat. It's very difficult. And paradoxically, because of the education that a lot of Cubans have gotten, when they have migrated to Central and South America, they've been relatively successful, proportionally so, compared to, say, even some of the native people. Let's say they went to Bolivia or Costa Rica or Venezuela or wherever they went. I'm curious what is happening to the population of Cuba.

36:12Like, what would you estimate it at? Because Cubans are now allowed to leave. And then you recently did some immigration reforms, allowed them to come back and visit as well. So how many people are leaving the island? To understand the issue for Americans, the city of Detroit, I believe, had about 2 million people. Today is close to 600 ,000, maybe half a million. Because the economy in Detroit has been depressed. And there are many other cities in the United States with similar conditions. Those cities have not been under economic warfare, under economic blockade. They just have a depressed economy for a combination of reasons.

36:53In the case of Cuba, there's a deliberate policy to make life as unbearable as possible for the population. And as you said, Cubans who are well-trained as professionals or as technicians know that if they go to countries in the region, or even if they go to the United States, they could find a job easily compared even to the natives of those countries because they're better trained. They're healthier, and they could always go back to Cuba if it doesn't work out. So you have outgoing migration from Cuba, which has an impact on the workforce, on the development, but it's understandable. Living conditions are so harsh.

37:33People tend to try to improve their situation. Any numbers, though? Any sense of how drastic the... To give you an idea, officially, we are 11 million people. Right. But on a specific day in the week, we calculate that we're over 9 million, 9.2, 9.3. So there are people who are residents in Cuba, but they're not in Cuba that day. Right. So it's not people that have necessarily taken the desire to permanently leave Cuba, but they go to some other place, see if it works. Some come back, some stay, some pull their family, some tell their family, stay a hole there, I'll send you money. They're better, there's schooling, there's hospitals and work, but I'll send you money.

38:15Because I don't have the conditions where I am enough to make you come over here and live here. So what is your understanding of what the goal of this policy is from the U.S. perspective? What outcome are they trying to force? The term they use is to take over Cuba, whatever that means. That doesn't sound nice to us. We're a sovereign nation. It has been tough for most or for many U.S. politicians historically to understand that Cuba is and has a right to be a sovereign nation. And that is at the center of the problem. There are people with more ambitious and more nasty agenda, which are influential in the United States.

38:54But the government has a consistent policy of trying to govern what occurs in Cuba, and we refuse to accept that. So the goal today is to punish the people of Cuba to a level that it threatens a humanitarian crisis, and with the aspiration that this will lead to enough pressure on the government or to overthrow the government. to force people to be irritated with their government. Not that they naturally would be, but to force that. And do you think that that is working? It's going a long way. It's not going to make the government collapse, nor is it going to make the authorities in Cuba to say, okay, we surrender our sovereignty and we ask the U.S.

39:41government, tell us what you want us to do and come and govern and do what you want. It also feels like the policy is self-defeating in the sense that usually the people that would lead these kinds of protests would be the kind of educated people in their 20s who kind of have the energy and the spunk to get out in the street. But as you said, they're leaving. If they're trying to improve their situation, one way to do it is just head out, which is much easier. They're leaving. They understand what's happening. They may have some disagreement with some of our policies, but they say, I want my country.

40:16I don't want this to be Puerto Rico. I want Cuba to be Cuban, for Cubans. And they also, being educated, they know what the result has been in every country that the U.S. has intervened militarily. Otherwise, it has not. The record shows that it has not implied an improvement of society or the livelihood. It is implied quite the contrary. So people are educated. And again, they could have some kind of disagreement with an existing policy. at this moment in Cuba, we're undergoing a very profound transformation socially and economically, more profound than any moment since the 1960s, towards greater market role, opening it expansively towards private sector.

41:02And there are people educated, well-placed in Cuba, who are highly concerned with this. They're not going to come out against the government because we know the government's trying to adapt to a new reality, that this is something we have been discussing for the past 15 years at least, and that it has taken us time to put them forward, waiting for a better moment. And we have understood that a better moment is not going to come. We've got to do it now. But these transformations are also creating some concern with some people in Cuba, but the government's going forward. Legislation is in place.

41:34It's being additional legislation put in place, and it's a dramatic change in Cuba. What the outcome is going to be, we don't know. But we need to do something to change the current reality. And this is theoretically what people like Marco Rubio have been pushing for decades. Say, we want market reforms in Cuba. We want to allow investment. We want to allow business creation. So what has been the response from people in the United States who have been demanding these changes from the Cuban government to see them now happening? You said theoretically. If you research profoundly, the record has shown that most attempts of reforming Cuba have been sabotaged by the U.S., either through political pressure or provoking situations that the government steps back.

42:25That's the real history. Now, we're not waiting for a reaction by the U.S. government because these are transformations that we're making for the people of Cuba, for improving Cuba. And because we know that anything we ask, the answer is going to be, we don't agree with that. That doesn't meet our expectation. And we believe that we should not meet the U.S. expectations. But you correctly point out that the kind of transportation that are taking place in Cuba, moving towards the market, expanding the private sector, giving opportunities for individuals in Cuba, living Cuba, for Cubans that live outside of Cuba, For foreigners that don't live in Cuba, to do business in Cuba with a more transparent legislation, with more predictable legislation, that is occurring in Cuba today.

43:12With limitations, when you're under the level of aggression that we are, you have limitations, and with some lack of experience. We're welcome, we're receiving it from some countries that are advising us with different points of views, some of them with a lot of knowledge, but without understanding of Cuba. And we're trying to do that, to try to move in a direction that can change Cuba and improve it in the way we are now. But I repeat, influential people in the United States have historically tried to put obstacles to Cuba's reforms. So based on the public reporting, there are no current diplomatic talks between the U.S.

43:51and Cuba. Is that accurate and is that something that Cuba is seeking? There's no standing system of dialogue. Look, we maintain contact. And we mutually have expressed Reddit. We've had a few meetings. We have not rejected the possibility of other meetings. But when we say that there's no progress, we're based on the fact which is evident, that if almost on a weekly basis, you're applying new sanctions and you're applying new pressures on Cuba, it is evident that there's no progress. We also try to be discreet. It's a general approach, historically, we've had, and we keep it on the, we don't want, we are against the leaks that come out in the media, which distort reality, which do not really represent what's going on.

44:37But what I can tell you is that in these talks, they're not negotiations, they're talks, communication. There has not been an expression yet by the U.S. that they're ready to work with Cuba for a constructive and respectful relationship between two sovereign nations to solve bilaterally issues, to construct a mutually beneficial relationship. There has been no proposal in that direction, as there has been no proposal to alleviate the situation of the people of Cuba that results from U.S. aggression. None whatsoever. And I say this because I've been articles saying that none of that has existed to now.

45:20Do they bring up Gaesta in any of the negotiations? Marco Rubio has made a huge deal, the Miami Herald has made a huge deal about the role of Gaisa and the Cuban economy. And how does Gaisa fit into the market reforms that you are rolling out now? Is that a rhetorical element of their objection, or is there something substantial there that they want you to do? The real name of that organization is Gai, not Gaisa. Okay, I already said it, Gaisa. This comes out of Miami as a guy. It's a guy. And it's an organization as they exist in almost every country, including the U.S. Cuba, because of being a developing country, because of relatively limited natural resources that can serve as capital formation, and the fact that we have access to no source of capital has had organizations, of which Guy has been one, that help accumulate capital for us, our development.

46:23So you ask yourself, where did the growth of tourism that made Cuba change its economic matrix in the 1990s and became the main source of income come from? Where does Cuba biotechnology industry come from? How were we able to build such a robust medical system? Where did the investment come from? It didn't come from the World Bank. It didn't come from any financial institution. It came from our own resources. through organizations like Gaiessa, whose role is to take part of the income and try to capitalize for the development and for investment in society. Now, because the specific case of Gai is linked to armed forces in Cuba, the Secretary of State, even before being Secretary of State, targeted as a usual propaganda mechanism.

47:13These are the military that use resources to do malign things and nasty things and to intervene in other countries, all of which is totally untrue. So he targets gas, which already today does not, for different reasons, doesn't have neither the size nor the influence in the Cuban economy it had in the past. Among other things, because of reality that we face and reorganization that we have today in the Cuban economy. But I insist, it's not the only one. And I don't mention others because I don't want new targets to come up. As you know, the U.S. has been very busy around the world. We had talks that were ongoing with Venezuela and then decided to indict President Maduro and effectively kidnap him.

47:54And has done this deal with Delce Rodriguez, taking the Venezuelan oil. We launched a war of aggression against Iran again whilst we were in the midst of diplomatic, alleged diplomatic talks with them. What sort of lessons have you taken from the Trump administration's actions around the world? that we're living in a very aggressive world. The world is practically divided between the respect to international law or the lack of respect. Respect to UN Charter, the recognition of sovereign equality or not, and the recognition of the rights of nations to build their own future or not. The U.S. approach is, they call it, peace through force, which means imposing U.S.

48:41what they identify as U.S. interests. I wonder if they are the interests of the U.S. citizens as a whole or the interests of us. Exclusive elite group in the United States. But that's another discussion. And impose it by strength and by force. It's the most powerful nation on earth and it carries out kidnappings as the one that you just mentioned. Do you think Venezuela could be a model that they pursue in Cuba? They could try. And I think they would increasingly understand that they will fail. That attempt will fail. It's a different country, different reality. The solar panel growth, when I was there in March, I think there were some periods of time where up to 20 % or so of the energy, and some days even more, was coming from solar panels.

49:29I would say 12, 14%. 12, 14. How is that unfolding now? and what is what is the u.s posture been as it you you were referencing an attempt by the u.s to kind of stall that as well stalls it when they speak of they want a severe cuba's relationship with china the greatest element that we import from china solar panels which is a country that produces the most and the cheapest and the u.s refuses to sell them to cuba so why wouldn't Has that stopped the import of panels? No, it hasn't stopped. But it slowed? There are obstacles in place. I mean, they're difficult through the shipping companies, through routes, through payments, different ways.

50:13But it continues to be part of our plans. We've continued to invest in that. It doesn't solve all our problems because solar energy is irregular. It's a very intense specific time of the day and specific times of the year, but not always. It needs to be supported by batteries, by other investments. We have a very fast learning curve in terms of the amount of time we need to invest and put in shape in one of the fields and to invest in the different areas and to understand the technology. But that continues. Not only with that, also with wind, also with the use of biogas. We're trying to see with waste management that we can produce electricity.

50:55That kind of problems we have. Is there any hope of another tanker being able to come through? Lots of hope. Because the fact that tankers don't come is a gross violation of international law. The U.S. intimidating every country in the world. We hope that at some point that crime, that violation of international law, would stop occurring. Remember, all of this is based on the allegation by the U.S. that Cuba, a relatively small country in the Caribbean, poses an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and U.S. foreign policy. Now, forget ideology. As a matter of common sense, can Cuba pose a threat to a nuclear power with 5 ,200 nuclear warheads, 11 aircraft carriers, military bases all over the world, including in our hemisphere?

51:50Is it logical? Is it credible to believe? Yet, based on that claim, the U.S. applies secondary sanctions or intimidates of applying to every country around the world. And nobody coincides it. Those sanctions seem to be working. Major companies that have been with Cuba for a very long time are pulling out. What's, how, I don't know how you can even answer this, but how long can this go on? Like what, and what is Cuba doing to try to reverse the outflow of these companies? It's a difficult question to answer. Imagine if Canada, Spain, France, California, or the state of New York, were all of a sudden cut from the U.S.

52:36and from the rest of the world. How long where they last with no fuel, no use of the U.S. currency, materials can't come in, choked as a medieval siege on that territory. So how can it last? We don't know. We hope that we can sustain it. But the pain is there. And I was describing it at the beginning. It's got a human cost with elderly people, with newborns, the population as a whole, on a daily basis. Most of the reports by U.S. media speak about the irritation of the population, of course, protests, people complaining. But they only touch the surface. They don't go to what's happened in a home with real problems, in a hospital, in a school, in a maternity ward.

53:25That's where the effect of this is really felt. As I'm sure you know, we have a significant and powerful voting bloc of Cuban Americans in the U.S. who have broadly been supportive of aggressive posture towards Cuba. How do you think about that group and their priorities and the way that they influence politics here in the U.S.? It's unfortunate. It's a rare issue. I never thought that the Vietnamese would support damaging their country or the Irish or the Italians, even in the times of Mussolini, that they would agree with the U.S. punishing the population of Italy or the population of another country with which the U.S.

54:06would disagree. Yet it occurs with not all the Cubans, but influential Cubans. And their power is not so much in their votes, but in the amount of money. Because it's the elite, the powerful ones, that contribute to the political parties, basically the Republican Party. I think it's an extension to believe that they represent the totality of the feelings of Cubans towards Cuba. But if you look at today the reality, specifically in Miami, there's fear among the population. People don't want to say the wrong words. They don't want to make the wrong statement. They don't want to travel to Cuba to meet with their families because they think they can feel consequences from the authorities or from powerful people in Miami if they do so.

54:53The U.S. has said it was going to send$100-plus million in aid. We actually reported that a significant portion of that was going to be Starlinks that they were trying to get Cuba to take. Originally. Now they're sending food kits. And of the$100 million that were urgently going to be sent to Cuba announced at the Vatican in the month of June, end of June or beginning of July, they've sent food kits in two badges for 700 families, which is a bag of beans, some detergent toothpaste, something like that, some rice, some small canned foods, basically that. And they're calling that$100 million? I don't know how they're going to reach$100 million.

55:36They must be now close to$80 ,000,$90 ,000. These are overpriced. But to reach$100 million is going to take a long time. And they exclude medicine and they exclude powdered milk. which are basic needs in Cuba. Yeah. And so this is sort of a PR stunt from the U.S. perspective. If it's anything like our weapons industry, 90 % of it will stay here in Northern Virginia as profit. When the Secretary of State announced it in the Vatican, he had not yet spoken to the government of Cuba about that, not even spoken to the religious organizations. And then he claimed that we were refusing it. They hadn't even mentioned it.

56:17Incredible. Right. Well, Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossillo, thank you so much for joining us. We very much appreciate it. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

56:48Man, wait a minute, hold up. They changed all of that? Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is there an epidemic against literature? More specifically, black literature. I'm Jacqueline Peace Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lit Podcast, we're outside asking why.

57:24They don't want a whole bunch of little Ella Bakers, Malcolm X's, and Martin Luther King running around. And when you look at a lot of different cultures, they're like, you need to know where you came from. And considering this is Black Reading Month, the only real question is, what are you reading next? Listen to Black Lit from the Black Effect Podcast Network on our iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up? This is Jay Valentine, co-host of the R &B Money Podcast alongside my brother, R &B legend Tank. Together, we've built a space for artists, executives and fans of R &B music to reminisce and tell the real stories behind the music.

57:57I have no money. I was hood famous. They think you're going to get everybody out. We lived in a project. Real Love came out. They're hearing the music and we had nothing. From Smokey Robinson to Mary J. Blige, B2K to Jill Scott. If you're a super dedicated R &B fan, this is where you belong. Listen to R &B Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.