C-SPAN’s Washington Journal examines U.S. foreign policy tensions: Marco Rubio-style officials probe Cuba’s Coast Guard shootout, CARICOM’s push for reforms amid 15% population loss since 2021, and Iran’s nuclear threats despite no current enrichment, citing 2035 DIA timelines for long-range missile risks. Ukraine’s war drags on with 7,000–8,000 weekly casualties, while U.S.-China relations balance trade stability against supply chain diversification (e.g., NVIDIA chips) and stalled nuclear talks. Haiti’s UN-backed gang suppression force gains traction, but elections hinge on security; Cuba’s medical missions are exposed as labor trafficking, with GAESA controlling 40% of its economy. Banking hearings and Ryan McCormick’s Transportation nomination round out the focus, underscoring C-SPAN’s role in dissecting geopolitical and domestic challenges through expert testimony and live proceedings. [Automatically generated summary]
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So you interviewed the other night.
I watched it about two o'clock in the morning.
There was a little thing called C-SPAN, which I don't know how many people were watching.
Don't worry, you were in prime time too, but they happen to have a little rerun.
Do you really think that we don't remember what just happened last week?
Thank goodness for C-SPAN, and we all should review the tape.
Everyone wonders when they're watching C-SPAN what the conversations are on the floor.
I'm about to read to you something that was published by C-SPAN.
There's a lot of things that Congress fights about, that they disagree on.
We can all watch that on C-SPAN.
Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN.
That was a make-for-C-SPAN moment.
Gathering Facts About Incident00:05:44
If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground.
And welcome forward to everybody watching at home.
We know C-SPAN covers this live as well.
We appreciate that.
And one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell.
This is being carried live by C-SPAN.
It's being watched not only in this country, but it's being watched around the world right now.
Mike said before I happened to listen to him, he was on C-SPAN 1.
That's a big upgrade, right?
Cuba's government announced that its Coast Guard had shot and killed four people aboard a U.S.-registered boat in its waters.
Shortly after the announcement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke about the incident and other international affairs.
Authorities of an incident off the coast of Cuba, we immediately began to look into it.
As it stands now, the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, others are involved.
The majority of the information we still possess is what Cuban authorities are providing, both the public and the U.S. government.
We have our embassy on the ground in Havana working this as we speak, asking for access to the people that were on those vessels if they were American citizens or permanent residents.
According to the Cuban regime, the boat was registered in Florida.
We're tracking that down.
We will know shortly, and we will know quickly, many more facts about this incident than we know right now.
The majority of the facts are Cubans.
We will verify that independently.
As we gather more information, then we'll be prepared to respond accordingly.
I'm not going to speculate.
I'm not going to opine on what I don't yet know.
But we're going to find out exactly what happened here, and then we'll respond accordingly.
Okay?
Any questions?
Have you been in touch with anyone in Cuba?
I mean, what's your question?
Well, the authorities in Cuba, the Border Guard, has constant contact with the Coast Guard, so they alerted them this morning.
I was made aware of it at that time.
Oftentimes in these incidents and things like this, the initial reports are incomplete.
And then as the day has progressed, I think early this morning, certainly by 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. this time, maybe a little later our time here, I reached out and we began to look at it independently.
We have various different elements of the U.S. government that are trying to verify elements of the story based on what's been provided to us now.
I know that the Coast Guard has responded to the area, to the vicinity.
I'll need to get more fidelity and understanding from them once I get on the airplane about what exactly they're looking for.
I don't know who has possession of the vessel, which is the first thing we would want to have.
We obviously want to have access to these people if they are American citizens or U.S. residents.
But I'm not going to speculate now because right now, still, a lot of the information that's out there is information that's been provided by the Cubans.
We are going to verify that information independently and reach our own conclusions.
So this is not U.S. government personnel.
It was another U.S. government.
No.
No.
Have you spoken to any Cuba viewers about this?
No.
We haven't spoken directly about this now.
No, I'm not going to comment about any conversations we've had on this topic.
Suffice it to say what it's important to be out there and everyone needs to know is that we're going to have our own information on this.
And we're going to figure out exactly what happened.
And there are a number of things that could have happened here.
But I'm not even going to, I was about to say, I'm not even going to speculate as to what it could have been.
It's a wide range of things.
Suffice it to say, it is highly unusual to see shootouts in open sea like that.
It's not something that happens every day.
It's something, frankly, that hasn't happened with Cuba in a very long time.
But we're going to find out.
We're not going to base our conclusions on what they've told us.
And I'm very, very confident that we will know the full story of what happened here and we will know it soon.
And then, you know, we'll respond appropriately based on what that information tells us.
If these were American citizens or residents, what kind of recommendation would you expect to be?
Yeah, I'm not going to speculate on what the U.S. will do.
What I'm telling you is that we're going to find out exactly what happened and who was involved, and then we'll make a determination on the basis of what we find out.
And we're going to find out.
But we're not going to just take what somebody else tells us.
We're going to find out.
I'm very confident we will be able to know the story, independently verify facts about it.
And just to clarify, you found out prior to the post-done accident.
Yes.
Well, and obviously there was an incident at sea, so we do have constant contact with them at the Coast Guard level, where they notify the U.S. Coast Guard on a variety of things, including migrants and so forth.
There's these mill-to-mill, I guess, Coast Guard to Coast Guard channels that exist.
And this reporting early on was fragmentary about an incident, but not the details.
They provided more details in the social media post they put out as well as a notice they sent to the embassy or from their embassy to the State Department.
But in it is embedded all sorts of facts or things that they claim to be facts, such as where the ship came from, where the boat came from, who was on it, what happened, and so forth.
These are the things we're going to independently verify.
And then, you know, we'll present that to the policymakers in our country, including the president, and we'll make determinations based on the facts.
Right now, we're still gathering facts.
Do you have any reason to have your origin or is it just your...
I have every reason to want our own information.
Cuba's Economic Vulnerability00:03:31
Like we don't generally make decisions in the United States on the basis of what the Cuban authorities are saying.
Is this a shift in policy?
What is the motivation?
No, it's always been legal to sell to the private sector in Cuba.
These would not be sales to the government.
These would not be sales to the military-owned GAESA, the company.
These would be sales to a very small private sector that exists in Cuba.
And that's always been legal.
I mean, there are people that have a license to do that now.
This would just expand to the numbers that could do it.
Again, it would go to the private sector.
The private sector in Cuba is quite small.
It exists, but it's small.
And it certainly, in and of itself, does not have the capacity to deal with the scale and scope of the challenges they're facing.
But if the Cuban economy were a functioning economy, it would have a much larger private sector.
And so what's clear is that, and I would say this, that the people of Cuba are suffering today.
They've been suffering for a long time.
They're suffering now, perhaps more than at any time in recent memory, perhaps in the history since 1959.
This is the worst economic climate that Cuba has faced.
And it is the authorities there in that government who are responsible for that.
They're the ones that have made decisions that have left Cuba vulnerable to the situation they're now in.
Understand that Cuba has largely survived on the basis of subsidies.
The Soviet Union gave them free things.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, they went into a special period, which was disastrous for them.
And then along came Ulgo Chavez and bailed them out for a long time.
When that sort of died off a little bit, the Maduro regime was providing them fuel, or they were providing them actually crude oil.
Some percentage of that was refined and used domestically, and a large percentage of that was never even made at the Cuba.
It was sold in the open market for cash to fund the regime and to fund the military-owned company.
So the reason why Cuba's electricity grid was already in collapse before Maduro was captured, it was already in collapse.
The reason why things are as bad as they are is because they have an economic model that does not exist, that does not work, doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
It is not functional.
And the only way Cuba is going to have a better future is if it has a different economic model.
Now, if you go back to President Trump's 2017 or 2018 executive orders on a new policy in Cuba, that policy was entirely designed in many ways to put the private sector and individual private Cubans not affiliated with the government, not affiliated with the military, in a privileged position.
The reason why those industries have not flourished in Cuba is because the regime has not allowed them to flourish.
So now that they're in a crisis, there's an opportunity for them to import fuel in small quantities, granted, through a private sector.
If we catch the private sector there playing games and diverting it to the regime or to the military company, if we find that they're moving that stuff around in ways that violate the spirit and the scope of these permissions, those licenses will be canceled.
But it's the same reason we provided humanitarian assistance.
We've provided humanitarian assistance in Cuba in the aftermath of the hurricane.
We provided it through the Catholic Church, not through the government.
And we're prepared to do something similar when it comes to fuel through the private sector, the small private sector.
But that alone will not solve Cuba's very dramatic problems that have been caused by 60 some odd years of mismanagement, ineptitude, and a failed economic model.
There's been some reporting that this was a boat, a private boat that was trying to rescue, help some people escape to Cuba.
Iran's Ballistic Missile Threat00:15:32
I don't know if you can comment on that and if you can say whether you would advise people to not do that, what can you say about that?
Yeah, well, first of all, I'm not going to comment about this specific boat until we have all the information.
So I just want to be clear.
I'm not going to speculate about whose boat it was, what they were doing, why they were there, what actually happened.
I'm not going to speculate on that because it's not smart to do that until we have all the facts.
Now, separate from that, yes, there have been people in the past that have run into Cuba to bring people and so on.
It is illegal.
It is a violation of federal law and run people back and forth.
And we've caught people doing that in the past.
It doesn't normally lead to shootouts, to be honest.
But I'm not claiming that's what's happening here.
I don't think it's fair for me and right on why it's to sit here and speculate.
It might be this and it might be that, when we're going to know.
We're going to know.
And when we know, then we'll tell you and we'll do what needs to be done about it, depending on what it is.
Secretary, do you think in your expectation, can you share with us your expectation for on the subject of Iran and the negotiations tomorrow and your own plans in terms of Middle East and Israel?
What should we be looking for next?
What are you expecting next?
Well, I think tomorrow Steve and Jared will be there.
I think they're on their way there now, actually.
And the President was very clear last night that he always prefers diplomacy.
But I want you to understand everyone to know that Iran poses a very great threat to the United States and has for a very long time.
They are in possession, first and foremost, after their nuclear program was obliterated, they were told not to try to restart it, and here they are.
You can see them always trying to rebuild elements of it.
They're not enriching right now, but they're trying to get to the point where they ultimately can.
The other thing I would point you to, however, is that Iran possesses a very large number of ballistic missiles, particularly short-range ballistic missiles that threaten the United States and our bases in the region and our partners in the region.
And all of our bases in the UAE, in Qatar, in Bahrain.
And they also possess naval assets that threaten shipping and try to threaten the U.S. Navy.
So I want everybody to understand that beyond just a nuclear program, they possess these conventional weapons that are solely designed to attack America and attack Americans if they so choose to do so.
These things have to be addressed.
The negotiations tomorrow and the talks tomorrow will be largely focused on the nuclear program.
And we hope progress can be made, because that's the President's preference, to make progress on the diplomatic front.
But it's also important to remember that Iran refuses, refuses to talk about the ballistic missiles to us or to anyone.
And that's a big problem.
Mr. Secretary, last night the President said that Iran was working to build missiles that will soon reach the U.S. Can you clarify if the U.S. assessment is Iran is actively seeking that capability?
Oh, yeah, yes.
How far away are they?
Well, I won't speculate as to how far away they are, but they are certainly trying to achieve, and this is not they're trying to achieve intercontinental ballistic missiles.
For example, you've seen them try to launch satellites into space.
You've seen them increasing the range of the missiles they have now.
And clearly they are headed in a pathway to one day being able to develop weapons that could reach the continental U.S.
They already possess weapons that could reach much of Europe already now as we speak.
And the ranges continue to grow every single year exponentially, which is amazing to me.
For a country that's facing sanctions, whose economy is in tatters, whose people are suffering, and somehow they still find the money to invest in missiles of greater and greater capacity every year.
This is an unsustainable threat.
There was a DIA assessment, I think, that said that if they chose to pursue this, that they would be able to develop these missiles that could reach the U.S. by 2035.
Is that still?
Well, I won't comment on assessments or anything that the intelligence community says.
Is it to say that it's a threat, but we can see that it's possible.
We saw North Korea do it.
We've seen other countries do it in the past.
And we would view that as a great threat to the United States.
But already now they possess missiles that threaten American interests.
As we speak, they possess thousands of short-range ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. bases located in the region, in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, in Bahrain, in the United Arab Emirates, throughout the region.
It's a threat that exists already.
Is tomorrow the last chance for diplomacy, Mr. Secretary?
I don't think diplomacy is ever off the table.
The President wants diplomatic solutions.
He prefers them.
He prefers them greatly.
He wants that more than anything else.
So I wouldn't characterize tomorrow as anything other than the list and a set of conversations, and hopefully they're productive.
But eventually we'll have to have conversations about more than just the nuclear program.
But if you can't even make progress on the nuclear program, it's going to be hard to make progress on the ballistic missiles as well.
So I wouldn't characterize tomorrow as anything other than the next opportunity to talk.
Could you just clarify, the president said Iran just has to say we will never have a nuclear weapon.
Is the question really then saying we will never have a weapon or is it saying we will never enrich?
They say they desert the right to enrich Iranian, but they're not going towards a weapon.
Well let me put it to you this way.
Let me put it to you this way.
If in fact what you're interested in is a peaceful nuclear program, you can do it like most of the countries in the world do it, which is they have above-ground reactors and they import the fuel.
We have deals now to do that with countries.
If what they really wanted was energy, they could do small modular reactors, which is something that's quite affordable and achievable for a lot of countries.
But when you say we want to enrich and we want to enrich deep underground, and you have a history in the past of enriching to 20 and even 60%, plus you're building missiles that could potentially carry warheads, that doesn't sound to me like someone who's a country that's not interested in building weapons.
So it's not just the rhetorical, it's the actions that back the rhetoric, which we simply haven't seen.
So you're looking for a permission to zero in Britain as America.
Well, they don't need to enrich in order to have nuclear energy.
They don't need nuclear energy, by the way.
They have plenty of natural gas.
But if they wanted nuclear energy, they could have it the way other countries have it.
The fact that they refuse to get it that way, the fact that they insist not just on enrichment, but on enrichment in locations located inside of mountains, is, I think you would have to lack common sense to not know what that means or what that could mean.
Democrats came away from the group of eight meeting kind of sounding alarmed by what they heard and saying that you guys need to make more of a case for why the U.S. should go to war with Iran.
Well, I don't comment about Gang of Aid briefings.
There were various topics that were discussed.
I don't comment on them.
That's why we do them in a classified setting.
I don't think anyone should leave those meetings talking about anything or even characterizing them.
At least that's the way we handled it when I was on the Gang of Aid.
Perhaps that's changed.
But generally, that said, just outside of the Gang of Aid briefing, yeah, what's happening with Iran is very concerning.
It's been very concerning for 40-something years.
And it's become increasingly concerning as they've increased their weapon capabilities.
So I don't think that's a mystery to anyone, that Iran is a deep concern.
Multiple administrations have confronted this threat.
The Fed has simply grown over time in terms of how they've been able to extend the reach of their missiles and their insistence, their blind insistence on being able to enrich and enrich in these hidden locations you even more uncomfortable.
But look, let's see what happens tomorrow.
Maybe something good will come of it.
Mr. Secretary Kennedy, can you confirm a comment on reports that you've spoken with rural pastoral discussions?
I won't comment on any conversations we've had.
Suffice it to say that the United States is always prepared to talk to officials from any government that have information to share with us or viewpoints they want to share with the United States.
And that's my job to do that.
So whether it's someone in Cuba or potentially one day someone in North Korea or right now in Iran, we're always open to listening.
That's different from a negotiation, obviously, but we're prepared to listen to the viewpoints that other people say.
Country located 90 miles off the coast of the United States.
It has a very severe and catastrophic economic crisis on its hands.
And if someone in their system has information to share with us about changes they're open to making or moves they're prepared to accept, we would certainly listen to that and and I would probably do that not in the setting in front of the media, because I think it would be more productive that way.
But you know ultimately, you know, actions will be important.
In something like that, there might be reform as a society.
Well, I mean, the status quo is unsustainable.
I had we had a meeting there today with all the leaders of CARICOM and it was one of the points I raised and I think virtually everyone in the room agreed that Cuba's status quo is unacceptable.
Cuba needs to change.
It needs to change.
And it doesn't have to change all at once.
It doesn't have to change from one day to the next.
Everyone is mature and realistic here.
We're seeing that prof, for example, in Venezuela.
And many of the countries represented at the CARICOM conference today were themselves countries that went through transitions at some point in their history.
But Cuba needs to change.
It needs to change dramatically because it is the only chance that it has to improve the quality of life for its people and not lose 15% of its population since 2021.
15% of the people of Cuba have left since 2021.
That is not a system that's working.
That's a system that's in collapse.
And they need to make dramatic reforms.
And if they want to make those dramatic reforms that open the space for both economic and eventually political freedom for the people of Cuba, obviously the United States would love to see that.
It would be helpful.
If they decide they're going to dig in and just continue forward, then I think they're going to continue to experience failure and the people of the country are going to continue to suffer and it'll be the regime's fault.
Going back to Iran for a moment, President Trump said that the nuclear sites have been obliterated under Operation Manhammer.
What has changed since then?
Have you seen movement of material?
What is it that you're talking about?
Oh, you have.
There's been reporting.
I don't know if you're here, but others have reported on it.
I think it's pretty clear that they have not abandoned their desire to enrich again.
They've not abandoned that.
In fact, they publicly insisted that they have the right to do so.
I won't comment on the intelligence picture, but I can tell you that there's reason to believe that they, given the opportunity, will return to enrichment one day.
They've been set back, but they can, if they try to rebuild it, we'll have to address it.
And because that was made clear to them.
And you said earlier this month that in order to achieve a meaningful agreement, there would have to be discussion of ballistic missiles.
Yeah, I said that here today again now.
I said it again.
It's important.
These ballistic missiles are a great threat.
So is there any way to walk away from Thursday's meetings of something that is meaningful enough to stop U.S. military action?
Well, that's for the president's made no decision on that.
So I don't know if Thursday's the key date for that.
I think progress needs to be made.
It would be good if progress was made on Thursday.
And I would say that the Iranian insistence on not discussing ballistic missiles is a big, big problem.
I'll leave it at that.
You talked about elections in Venezuela.
I wonder what you're thinking in timeline for that.
Well, I don't know if we'd set an artificial timeline.
The important part is, just so you think about it logically, it's hard to have elections when many of the people that may want to participate have been in jail or are still overseas.
So I do think that as we enter this recovery phase, which we think slowly, I think we've done a pretty good job working with the interim authorities on the stabilization phase.
You have not seen mass migration, you have not seen civil war, you have not seen violence.
On the contrary, you've seen some real stability on the ground and you've seen a growing in productivity among their key sectors.
I think now you enter into this, we're increasingly entering into this phase of recovery, and part of that is a national reconciliation.
So there's been very positive steps taken.
Hundreds of political prisoners have been freed.
The infamous prison El Agoya has been closed.
Those are all very positive.
You've seen an amnesty law pass.
There was actually a real debate in their National Assembly over the law and even amendments filed to it and so forth.
These are all very positive.
They're not enough, but they're positive.
And I think that begins to create the groundwork for civil society there to function.
To have elections, you need to have a number of factors.
You need to have political parties that are forming.
You need to have political movements.
You need to have a media environment that allows people to campaign and get the word out.
All of these things have to be in place, and you need to have candidates that can run.
And so I think it begins by getting a lot of the people that were in jail were in jail because they were candidates or because they were supporting candidates or because they were involved in their politics.
So you have to have a real civil political society in order to have elections.
And that begins, in the case of Venezuela, by the amnesty law, by the freeing of political prisoners, and by the ability of Venezuelans abroad who want to participate in the country's political life to return.
There are other factors that people need to consider.
As an example, in order to have a real election, you will need to account for how Venezuelans living abroad vote.
Are there consulates set up where they can come in and vote?
Because those were big polling places in the past.
And in fact, Chavez prohibited consular voting at one point, and so did Maduro because they were losing those votes big time, as you can imagine.
So there's a pathway here.
We're not even nine weeks since Maduro was captured.
I think life in Venezuela today is not good enough, but it is substantially better than it was nine weeks ago, where this could have gone in a very different direction.
And frankly, a lot of the so-called experts on many of your outlets were predicting this is going to be catastrophic and the whole thing's going to fall apart and it's going to descend into chaos.
That has not happened.
But we've got to keep on top of it.
It has to keep moving in this direction.
The trend line is good, but it needs to be sustained.
This is still a process of recovery, and then you can move into that period of transition to something.
In the end, here's the bottom line.
For Venezuela to achieve its potential, which means to attract the kind of investment it needs to truly rebuild its economy and achieve its potential, it will need to legitimize its government through an election.
And they know that.
Mr. Secretary, yesterday was the four-year anniversary of Russia's war against Ukraine.
There's been very little progress in ending our disgrace, we've been told only bilateral discussions between the country.
Yes, is there a point in which the administration has changed tax and increased pressure on Moscow as a people like you and others in the Mr. Well the administration has continued to increase pressure on Moscow?
As an example, the president levied additional sanctions late last year on their oil company on Rosneft.
The administration continues to sell weaponry to Ukraine.
We don't sell weapons to Russia and we don't sanction Ukraine.
The president values the fact that he is the only global leader that has any chance in the world of bringing these two sides together to the negotiating table.
We're the only country or only entity on the planet that's been able to achieve having Russian negotiators and Ukrainian negotiators sit at a table and talk to one another.
And for a war as horrible as this, this is a very important position for us to be in that we don't want to forfeit because if we walk away or if we foreclose that, then who's going to do it?
The United Nations isn't going to do it.
France isn't going to do it.
The EU isn't going to do it.
The Russians won't even speak to them.
So we don't want to walk away from the, we know that at the end that war in Ukraine does not have a military solution.
That war will be settled through a negotiation.
And right now we are the only country in the world that can be a catalyst for negotiation.
If we forfeit that role, no one else can do it.
That said, do I believe the president's patience is infinite?
I do not.
But I'm not going to forecast for you when that runs out or at what point he decides not to do it any longer.
I can tell you, and I think you've heard him express, a deep frustration that this has not come to an end because he sees it as a completely stupid and senseless war in which every single week 7, 8,000 soldiers are being killed on the battlefield.
Compelling China's Cooperation00:10:52
Numbers that would be staggering in the context of any other conflict in the world.
And that's what's happening, and it's doing tremendous damage to Russia.
But it's also doing generational damage in Ukraine.
Every day that goes by, more and more destruction, and it could take a generation for that country to rebuild, not to mention the suffering of its people that they've gone through this winter has been horrific.
But why is that frustration being levied at both Zelensky and Putin when it is Moscow that is continuing to strike civilian infrastructure?
Well, yeah, no, I go back to the point I made to you, and that is that the reason why Ukraine has been able to sustain this war is because the United States has provided and sold weapons to Ukraine and has also provided them with intelligence assistance and the like.
And also, we've imposed sanctions on Russia.
We've not imposed sanctions on Ukraine.
So in that sense, the U.S. has not been stagnant here with regards to it.
I think the President's frustration is generalized, and you've seen that expressed from time to time.
He just doesn't understand how two countries in such a vicious, horrific, and bloody war cannot reach an understanding on how to end it.
He wants to see it ended.
And he's done a lot.
He's invested a lot of political capital in this.
I mean, the easiest thing to have done is to just continue with the previous policies that was just ending into a protracted conflict.
The president's invested a tremendous amount of political capital.
Steve has traveled, I don't know how many times, on his own dime, all over the world, to try to bring this to a conclusion.
So we have a lot of people that have invested a lot of energy into this.
And I think we've made progress in narrowing the issues.
But I think some issues still remain that are very, very difficult, unfortunately.
Secretary, the president has a trip to China scheduled the end of March 20th or early April.
Yes.
And last night in the State of the Union was the first time in two decades that China wasn't expressly mentioned in this speech.
What's your view on the competition for the U.S. with China and China's access to things like cutting-edge NVIDIA chips or other AI chips and things?
Yeah, so I think we've reached a point at least of sort of strategic stability in the relationship.
I think both countries concluded that having an all-out global trade war between the United States and China would be deeply damaging to both sides and to the world.
There remain issues of disagreement.
There remain issues that we know in the long term are going to have to be confronted and could be irritants in our relationship.
We've not been bashful in saying that we don't think it's sustainable to live in a world where we depend on some country for 90% of anything, whether it's supply chains or critical minerals or the like, pharmaceuticals and the like.
And we have every intention of doing everything we can to ensure that our critical supply chains are diversified.
And that will continue to be a point of contention, I imagine, but that's something that's critical to our national security and that we've been working on and will continue to work on.
I also think that from a responsibility standpoint, the two largest economies in the world who both possess nuclear arsenals have to be able to talk, have to be able to communicate, and have to be able to interact.
It would be reckless and irresponsible for the United States and China not to have meetings, not to have conversations, and not to have opportunities for our leaders to interact with one another.
I just think it's, I don't know anybody who thinks that's a good idea.
It would be foolish and frankly dangerous for us not to have a relationship with them even as our areas of conflict and disagreement remain.
Are you worried though about the technology theft or that they're getting access to chips that export control should be preventing them from getting access to blackmails and everything?
Yeah, and every agreement the president's made has all gone through a full national security review to minimize and mitigate against that.
And obviously, you know, no measures are perfect.
They've also been developing their own native capabilities, oftentimes we would imagine, by information they've garnered from other countries.
These are all well-established things, but as far as the advances they have made.
But yeah, I mean, that's what will continue to be part of the dynamic in this relationship and in balancing all of this out.
But as I said, I mean, we've reached a point of sort of strategic stability.
Both countries see value in that.
We've gotten them to schedule more fentanyl precursors, which is important.
Now we need them to act on it.
We've seen them increase their purchase of American agricultural goods, but there are other areas where we wish they were doing more, and we'll continue to press on those.
Are they going to take you off the sanctions list so you can go?
We'll find out when I go.
Mr. Secretary, there were talks in Geneva this week between officials who deal with nuclear weapons from the United States, China, and Russia.
I wondered if you could characterize how those talks, what came of those talks, and whether there's any sign that Chinese officials would consider some kind of trilateral nuclear non-proliferation treaty like the President has suggested he is seeking.
Well, we think ultimately in the 21st century for there to be a true arms control agreement, it has to involve China.
Their stockpiles have increased dramatically.
Their position that they would argue is that they're still way behind the United States and Russia.
We think that's irrelevant.
They certainly have the capacity to catch up and are well on their way to doing so.
So we believe, the President strongly believes, that for any sort of agreement on nuclear agreement in the 21st century to be legitimate, it has to involve these three countries, the United States, Russia, and China.
And we're going to continue to explore their willingness to do so.
They have publicly said they're not willing to do it.
I'm sure you've heard them say that.
I'm sure they've reiterated, and I know they restated that again very recently.
But we'll continue to press on it because we think it would be good for the world if we could reach such an agreement.
The President would be in favor of that if we could do it.
But it has to be all the countries.
So how do you compel China to, if they're saying it's just not in our interests?
Well, then we may not have a deal.
I mean, we can't compel them.
They'll just have to argue to the world why they need to keep building nuclear weapons.
And, you know, that's a sovereign choice that they can make.
I mean, you can't compel anyone to make a deal.
You can certainly create incentives for them to do it, but you can't compel it.
So, you know, we can pressure, we can guide, we can cajole, but we can't compel it.
So ultimately, if they want to make an arms deal with the three countries, we're prepared to talk about it.
But if they don't want to do it, then we won't have one.
We'll just keep doing what we need to do.
Here's also the Prime Minister is in it.
What's the criteria?
I mean, what are you looking for from the Prime Minister?
Well, I mean, a couple things.
We had a rough patch there early this year when the Transitional Council said they weren't going to leave.
We addressed it forcefully.
They left.
So we're where we need to be now.
The gang suppression force is building.
We are very happy with the commitments we have gotten in terms of personnel.
We feel like we've got more commitments and we have spots available for that gang suppression force.
We need to do a little bit better on the funding.
We're still looking for donor countries to fill in gaps, but we think we'll get there.
It'll be under UN auspices, which is important for the UN to show that it can solve a problem.
And the goal of this entity will be able to get on the ground and allow the Haitian authorities to hold territory from these gangs.
So you can have a baseline of stability that allows you to do two things.
Number one, rebuild the country without having to go through roads that have checkpoints run by these criminal gangs.
And number two, hold elections, perhaps later this year.
Maybe not in the middle of the summer when it's rainy season, but later this year, that's the desire they have as well.
It's hard to hold elections, however, when you still have gangs conducting checkpoints, and those aren't going to be real elections.
So that's why the gang suppression force is so important.
And why, you know, I'm very proud of the role the U.S. played in forming that.
And I'm very happy at the role that countries like Canada and others have played, been very forceful in helping us with this.
There are a couple other countries we wish would step up and do a little more, and we'll be talking about that.
I've raised it at every G7 meeting.
And we've gotten good response.
Japan has now made contributions and others.
We need to get a few more donor countries up to the plate here.
Mr. Secretary, in meetings today, you know, obviously a lot of these islands here have had good relations with Cuba.
A lot of them have had these medical missions that they rely on.
They send their own doctors, local doctors to be trained in Cuban medical schools.
Is this something that came up today?
It obviously has been something that the U.S. is pressuring them to move away from, but are there alternatives to a place like St. Kitts that is so small?
Yeah, well, we're providing alternatives to them.
We have medical missions that can provide an alternative.
And in fact, we've met some of those folks in the past.
The other thing with the Cuban medical program is that the fact that these people are working, basically it's human trafficking.
I mean, they're barely even being paid.
Their freedom of movement is tightly restricted.
And we want these countries to understand that that's what they're participating in.
They're paying this money to the regime, which collects the funds.
You know, they get paid for these medical missions.
Virtually none of this money goes to these doctors, who are in many cases, you know, being, we think it's like a version of human trafficking, labor trafficking.
And we think it's wrong.
Now, you've seen other countries that have decided, well, just pay the doctors directly, but the Cubans won't allow it.
So, again, that's sort of the point we've raised with them.
I mean, we're not going to cut diplomatic relations with countries in the Caribbean because they don't agree with us on it.
But we make a forceful point about it, and it came up today.
It wasn't the feature of the conversation, but it came up.
All right, let's get out of here one more.
Are you guys all traveling?
All of them?
Not all of them.
Okay.
Come back to Cuba.
That plane ain't that big.
Go ahead.
Countries you met today have raised concerns about sort of spillover and instability caused by the humanitarian crisis there.
Is the move today sort of recognition that the humanitarian crisis is getting out of hand?
U.S. I mean, no, first of all, forget about today.
The humanitarian crisis is getting out of hand because the Cubans don't know how to run an economy.
They're incompetent.
They have a military-controlled holding company named GAESA, which controls 40% of their GDP, and none of the money that that company has generated flows to the coffers of the government.
None of that money goes to schools.
None of that money goes to roads.
None of that money goes to feeding the population.
You have a country that has fertile farmland that imports sugar.
This was one of the world's leading exporters of sugar.
Now they import sugar.
They import almost all their food.
It's a dysfunction.
It's just not even an economy.
It's a total dysfunction.
That's their fault.
As far as spillover effect, they're not more concerned than we are.
We're 90 miles away.
And the U.S. has experienced mass migration from Cuba in the past.
Certainly in the early 90s with the Rafter crisis, but as recently as 2021 and 22, we were having people show up in the Florida Keys and stranded in the Bahamas.
So we don't want to see it either.
And ultimately, as far as the move today with the oil, this is existing.
The law allows us to do business like fuel and even telecommunications with the Cuban private sector.
The problem is the Cuban private sector is very small.
If they want to open the gates and allow the Cuban private sector, independent of the military, independent of the government, to grow, that solution is there.
What the Cuban people should know is this, that if they are hungry and they are suffering, it's not because we're not prepared to help them.
Cuban Private Sector Barrier00:00:50
We are.
It's that the people standing in the way of us helping them is their Communist Party.
That's who's standing in the way.
If they move out of the way, we're more than happy to work with individual Cubans so they can have an opportunity to feed their families and build their economy.
But we are not the impediment.
They are.
All right?
Let's go home.
I'll look now at our live coverage Thursday on the C-SPAN networks.
On C-SPAN at 10 a.m. Eastern, FDIC Chair Travis Hill, Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, and others testify to a Senate Committee on Banking Regulation.
On C-SPAN 2, at 10 a.m. Eastern, the Senate convenes and will consider Ryan McCormick's nomination to be Under Secretary of Transportation for Policy.