On Sunday, President Obama defended his latest effort to work with Cuba as a calculated diplomatic effort and responded to critics who say the policy is yet another example of the president being too quick to appease bad actors.
"We have been very firm with respect to those countries that we think are violating international law, or are acting against our interests," he said. "For 50 years we've tried to see if we can overthrow the regime through isolation, it hasn't worked. If we engage, we have the opportunity to influence the course of events at the time when there's going to be some generational change in that country. And I think we should seize it, and I intend to do so."
The president announced a normalization of relations with the communist nation last week, but it was received with mixed reactions.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fl.), the son of Cuban immigrants and a representative of a state where 70 percent of the United States’ Cuban population currently lives, quickly emerged as one of the most vocal critics.
Rubio continued to be the face of the opposition, appearing on three Sunday shows to lambast the policy as one that fails the Cuban people and makes it more difficult to achieve democracy.
"Our goal for Cuba is freedom and liberty for the Cuban people, and my opposition to what the president has done is it won’t do anything to further that cause," Rubio said on NBC’s "Meet the Press."
"If you’re going to make concessions to Cuba. If you’re going to recognize them diplomatically, if you’re going to have more commerce with them, there has to be some reciprocal opening on their part towards democracy. There was none in this engagement. So that’s why this policy was misguided."
"If I was president," Rubio said, "what I would have done is I would have actively and vibrantly engaged with democracy activists inside the island of Cuba who have all, many of whom wanted changes Cuba policy, but who all feel betrayed by this president. He completely ignored them and threw them to the side."
Rubio maintained that he was not against changing the United States’ relationship with the Cuban government, but rejects the current plan because it will "not lead to freedom."
"I am not opposed to changes in Cuba policy. I think that we constantly need to reexamine our foreign policy. I’m opposed to changes like this that have no chance of leading to the result that we want, which is more freedom and more liberty for the Cuban people," Rubio said on CBS’s "Face the Nation."
"This change is entirely predicated upon with false notion that engagement alone automatically leads to freedom, and I think we have evidence that that’s not the case. Look at Vietnam and China, countries that we have engaged."
Those relationships, between the U.S. and other communist countries, are often cited as evidence that Cuba deserves a similar diplomatic relationship. Rubio disagrees because he says places like Vietnam and China are "no more politically free today than they were when this that engagement started."
"We should actually learn our lesson from those policies," Rubio told NBC.
"You talk about China as an example—we reestablished relations with China in the 1970s, certainly the Chinese economy has grown, but politically they’re more repressive than they were twenty or thirty years ago. There’s no freedom of religion. No freedom of speech. No free access to the Internet. No elections. No political parties. So in essence that is the model the Cubans will try to follow."
The Cuban government, Rubio said, will "use all of the benefits of access to the U.S. markets to grow, line their own pockets … but there isn’t going to be any political opening."
"Vietnam and China are the model," for what Cuba hopes to achieve, Rubio said, adding that Cuban President Raúl Castro has already made it apparent in public statements where he emphasized that the political system will not change.
The majority of the Republican Party appears to support Rubio’s stance, as well as some Democrats like Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.).