The indictment of officially former but probably still current Cuban dictator Raúl Castro triggered strong emotions all across the spectrum, whether you were a part of the exile community holding out for justice after 67 years of horrors, or whether you are a media apologist enraged that the brother of one of your heroes might soon find the D-boys knocking on his door. This is particularly true at MS NOW, where there is no shortage of seething over the indictment.
Watch as President Barack Obama’s own “Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting” Ben Rhodes joins Jen Psaki in rage-vomiting all over the indictment and over Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s earlier video address directed at the Cuban people.
WATCH: Jen Psaki and Ben Rhodes hopelessly seethe at the indictment of Raúl Castro, to whom their boss personally offered his limp wrist in 2016. Note the gigantic lie about what causes scarcity in Cuba and note the multiple gratuitous potshots at the Cuban exile community.
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) May 21, 2026
JEN… pic.twitter.com/VATycrVXY1
JEN PSAKI: Okay. I just want to start with the- the video that Secretary of State Marco Rubio put out today in Spanish. It was a Spanish-language message. What do you think? Who is the audience? What is he trying to achieve for this video? What did you make of it?
BEN RHODES: Well, you know, Jen, as you remember, I negotiated the normalization of relations with Cuba, including with Raul Castro, directly. Traveled to Havana with you and President Obama in 2016. So I've thought a lot about this. That video was extraordinary in its hubris, tone,-deafness and hypocrisy. I think the audience for that video was not the Cuban people, most of whom probably won't even see it. The audience was kind of Rubio's own political base. The more hardline Cuban Americans, mainly in south Florida, who have wanted there to be a regime change since the Bay of Pigs invasion, when this was last attempted in the Kennedy administration.
And just very quickly to go through it, the absurdity of it. Look, I'm not here to defend the Cuban government, but the reality is the scarcity in Cuba is not because its leaders stole some money from the people. It's because there's been an embargo for decades that denies basic goods and denies Cuba access to the international financial system. And because there's been a full blockade on Cuba for months, which has denied them fuel, which has led to power shortages, which has killed people, because if you cut off power to hospitals, people die and children are malnourished.
Second, the absurdity of him talking about the corruption of billions of dollars being stolen at the same time that Donald Trump, his family and his cronies have been looting literally the American treasury or leveraging American power to get billions of dollars in crypto companies. Nobody believes that this is some earnest anti-corruption agenda.
And then lastly, do we really think these people are credible in delivering messages about human rights and democracy as they dismantle human rights and democracy at home? No. So this is about power. This is about treating the Western Hemisphere like our empire. And it's about something that no Americans, other than that small political political base of Rubio’s is interested in, which is yet another regime change operation.
When one hears the nominal utterance of “with all due respect”, you know that there is some disrespect incoming. Likewise the “I’m not here to defend the Cuban government”- uttered both by Rhodes and Psaki beforehand, which was promptly followed by nothing less than disgusting regime apologia.
What destroyed Cuba was the COMMUNISM. Not Helms-Burton, or the embargo, or the various post-Venezuela actions taken by the Trump administration. Havana was in ruins, with hungry people roaming its trash-lined streets, well before the oil embargo. Rhodes knows that and Psaki knows that, but they’d like their viewers not to know.
Hence this hatefest on MS NOW, conducted by two Obama-era officials who resent the exile community’s broad rejection of their failed precious Cuba Deal, which yielded little more than Obama’s infamous limp-wristed photo with Raúl Castro. This explains Rhodes's weird domestic policy non sequiturs, and rage at this new approach to Cuba, knowing full well there is very little they can do about it other than cope and seethe.
