Rubio: Obama has it wrong on Iran, Cuba
NEW YORK — Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio vowed Friday to roll back the Obama administration’s new Cuba policy on his first day in office, casting the plan to normalize relations with the island nation as a dangerous shift that gives the Castro regime international legitimacy and more resources to repress its people.
In a blistering speech Friday to the conservative-leaning Foreign Policy Initiative in New York, delivered the same day Secretary of State John Kerry re-opened the U.S. embassy in Havana, the Florida senator charged that President Barack Obama’s diplomacy — on Cuba and the recent Iran nuclear deal — provides evidence of “every flawed strategic, moral and economic notion” that has driven the Democratic president’s foreign policy.
“He has been quick to deal with the oppressors, but slow to deal with the oppressed,” Rubio said. “And his excuses are paper-thin.”
The Cuban-American lawmaker has made foreign policy a centerpiece of his campaign for president and a focus in his first five years in Congress, where he has served as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In the speech, Rubio said he would return Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism and require the Castro regime to “carry out meaningful political and human rights reforms” or lose its new diplomatic and economic benefits with the U.S.