AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Cuba, five months into the Trump administration’s energy blockade of the island, coming on top of the longest embargo in U.S. history. Expanded U.S. sanctions have exacerbated Cuba’s economic crisis, forcing 10 million Cubans to live with rolling blackouts, inflation and shortages of basic goods.

This is 64-year-old Felicia de la Caridad Álvarez, a resident of Old Havana.

FELICIA DE LA CARIDAD ÁLVAREZ: [translated] We’ve been without water for six months. Water is essential in a home. Without water, you’re nothing. Life doesn’t flow. That cistern is empty. Every 21 days, or a little longer, if I don’t push the mayor or the director of Aguas de la Habana, they don’t send the water truck. And what they do send is a small one. What we need here is a big one.

AMY GOODMAN: This year, President Trump repeatedly threatened to take over Cuba. But at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio evaded a question about whether the Trump administration plans to invade the island. The question came from Illinois Democratic Congressmember Jonathan Jackson, the son of Reverend Jesse Jackson. Congressman Jackson recently returned from a visit to Cuba.

REP. JONATHAN JACKSON: In closing, I would like to ask you: Will you invade Cuba? I yield back.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: Oh, I have one second to answer? What do I do? I mean, you guys tell me your rules here. I tried to write down all the stuff you said there.

REP. JONATHAN JACKSON: Will you invade Cuba?

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: Well, that’s not the only thing you said.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Just last week, Rubio described Cuba as a failed state threatening U.S. national security. He was speaking at a Cabinet meeting.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: Cuba is in a lot of trouble, because, unfortunately for them, it’s run by a bunch of incompetent communists. … It’s 90 miles from our shores. And having a failed state 90 miles from our shores is a threat to the national security of the United States.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Wednesday, June 3rd, was the 95th birthday of former Cuban president and Fidel’s younger brother, Raúl Castro. He was a key figure in the Cuban Revolution and remains a powerful figure in Cuban politics, despite having stepped down in 2018.

AMY GOODMAN: Last month, on May 20th, Cuban Independence Day, the Trump administration unsealed an indictment against Raúl Castro for murder and other crimes over the 1996 shootdown of two planes flown by Cuban exiles from Miami who were part of the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue, founded by the CIA operative José Basulto. Two days later, President Trump threatened Cuba once again, saying it was likely he would order military strikes.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Princeton University, Ada Ferrer, professor of history and the author of Cuba: An American History, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Her latest book is a memoir about growing up between Cuba and the United States. It’s called Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter.

Professor Ferrer, welcome to Democracy Now! Start off by responding to the latest, the indictment of now the 95-year-old former President Raúl Castro. Marco Rubio, is it pushing hard for — is it overthrow? Is it change of administration? But the fact is, he said that it’s a threat to the national security of the United States, being just 90 miles offshore.

ADA FERRER: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, Amy. It’s good to be here.

May has been such a busy month in terms of the U.S. pressure campaign against the Cuban government there. You mentioned the indictment of Raúl Castro. There have been the hardening of secondary sanctions against Cuba. And that is all having an effect on the ground. Just a couple of days ago, Spanish and Canadian companies involved in tourism and hotels have announced that they’re pulling out, or partially pulling out.

So, the situation there is dire. It has been for quite some time, and it’s gotten worse and worse over the last five months. So, you know, it’s so — it’s so hard to predict what will happen, in part because Donald Trump is unpredictable. But there’s no question that it’s the Cuban people who are bearing the brunt of the policies of both governments.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Ferrer, if you could also respond specifically to Rubio’s comments in this regard, Marco Rubio himself a Cuban American, at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday, evading a question about whether the Trump administration plans to invade Cuba, and then describing Cuba as a failed state threatening U.S. national security?

ADA FERRER: Yeah, I mean, he says Cuba is a threat because it’s 90 miles from its shores and it’s a failed state. But, you know, the geographic position of Cuba hasn’t changed, last I looked. I don’t have access, obviously, to the kind of internal documents that they do. But given the hardships in Cuba, given the fact that right now the government can’t — you know, can’t provide water and electricity, it’s hard to think about it as a serious threat to a government like the U.S., which is so powerful.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And who do you ultimately —

ADA FERRER: And in terms of invading, I mean, who — sorry. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: No, no, please go ahead, Professor.

ADA FERRER: Well, in terms of invading, I mean, Trump has been threatening that since — since January, since the Maduro operation. You know, people thought — he said in the beginning that it would happen within days. You know, the Cuban government would fall within days. That obviously didn’t happen. He’s perfectly capable, I think, of invading, as is Rubio, as is this government. But, you know, it’s hard to predict from one day to the next. You see what’s happening in Iran, what’s happening in this country. And, you know, it’s just — it’s hard to say. But I have no doubt that Trump would do that if he thought it worked — it would work.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Ferrer, if you could — you know, your position, broadly speaking, has been one in which you’re absolutely against American imperial ambitions in Cuba, and also those being the cause of much of the suffering in Cuba, in particular with this increase in the level of sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on Cuba. But you have simultaneously also criticized the government in Cuba. If you could talk a little bit about this and why you think it’s essential to hold both these positions simultaneously?

ADA FERRER: Yeah, so, I think — I mean, it’s clear the embargo has done harm to the Cuban people, and, you know, the really intensified sanctions since January have, as well. My sense is that the Cuban government is not focused; its priority is not the well-being of the Cuban people right now. It has made decisions in the short run and in the long run that have not prioritized them. So, for example, it invests even — even with tourism in decline, continues — it has continued, until recently, to invest heavily in tourism, ignoring sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, education, health — all of which are in horrible decline.

Even going back — you know, I started traveling to Cuba in 1990, which was shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. So, I spent a lot of time there in what is called the Special Period. Fidel Castro called it the Special Period in Time of Peace. And part of the way that the government, the Cuban government, survived the fall of the Eastern Bloc, which was its patron and provided most of the petroleum and subsidies that kept the Cuban state afloat — part of the way they handled that was to turn to tourism. So, I spent a lot of time there in the early '90s. And you would see the water trucks, you know, that your — that the speaker you featured just a few minutes ago talked about. And you'd see these huge water trucks in front of tourist hotels, while people in Havana had no water.

And, you know, you can’t ignore basic infrastructure for 30 years and divert all investments to tourism, and not expect it all, eventually, to come crumbling down. And so, what we’re living through — what Cubans are living through now is the combined effect of a long-standing embargo and a government that has not — that has not invested significantly in basic infrastructure and in well-being, in particular over the last 30 years.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Professor Ferrer, now we would like to turn to your remarkable memoir, Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter, in which, of course, you tell your own story, the story of you and your family, between Cuba and the U.S., the story of your migration to the U.S. But, of course, what you write about has much wider and broader implications for how we understand migration generally. And I’d just like to read to you from your book, in the — right at the beginning, you have three notes to the reader, the third of which reads, quote, “The consequences of migration are many. One is that people often have to live the intimacy of family across multiple languages, the burden and privilege of translation falling usually to the children.” So, first of all, if you could talk about your own position as that, at least in your initial years in the U.S., and what that means in terms of how migrants — what they experience as they come to the U.S.?

ADA FERRER: Yeah, this is — you know, the book is an immigrant memoir, so it’s the story that many immigrants share about living between two places. It is also a story about family separation, which is such an important topic, given what’s happening in the U.S. right now. So, at the heart of the story is my own migration with my mother from Havana in 1963. And when we came to the U.S., well, there were no direct flights, because it was after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and those had been suspended. But we went to Mexico briefly and then joined my father in New York. My mother, we left behind my brother, my mother’s son from a first marriage, who was 9-and-a-half years old. So, our life in the U.S. began with that absence at its heart, so leaving behind my brother, my grandparents. And, you know, it’s what many immigrants have to do. Sometimes politics can make all that a lot harder. In the case of Cuba, there was no such thing as going back. Cubans in the U.S. and abroad weren’t allowed to go back until — for short visits, until 1979. And it was hard for military-age men to migrate. So, a lot of times separations that people had hoped would last maybe a few months or a year or two stretched into many years and decades. And I hear echoes of it in so many things today. I hear it, you know, listening to some of the people interviewed at Delaney Hall, the boy who graduated, and his father couldn’t be there. You know, that separation is at the — family separation is at the heart of so much.

And then, also I hear it in a continued Cuban migration. Cuba has seen the largest exodus in its history over the last five, eight years, since the — since 2017, 2018. Numbers, exact numbers, are hard to come by, because Cuba hasn’t had a census since 2012, but it’s predicted that Cuba has lost about 20% of its population, many of them young people who basically see no future in that country and decide, literally, that the future is another country. And each of those people — or, many of those people leave behind loved ones and leave in a moment of great uncertainty, and suffer the effects of family separation, of decisions made by governments who — who don’t, frankly, think about them enough.

So, the echoes of our family’s story and our migration, I see — I see in so many places. I have, you know, a niece — a niece’s daughter right now living here, who has been rendered undocumented after the fact by Trump’s immigration policies. And I have another cousin who spent about six months in Alligator Alcatraz and is now in Krome detention center in Miami. And these are people, you know, contrary to what some in the administration said, have committed no crime, and are just trying to live.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, Human Rights Watch says that the Trump administration has deported over 4,300 Cubans to Mexico. We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to do an interview in Spanish, and we’re going to post it online at democracynow.org. Ada Ferrer is a professor of history at Princeton University. Her new book is Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book Cuba: An American History.

That does it for our show. I’ll be at IFC tonight at 6:30 for the screening of Steal This Story, Please!, a story about Democracy Now! and our 30 years and independent media overall, along with — along with the director, Carl Deal, and Kathryn Grody, the actor, will be moderating. Tomorrow night, I look forward to being in Tampa, Florida, celebrating WMNF. We’ll be at the Sun-Ray theater for 6:30 and 7:30 screenings of Steal This Story, Please!, then on to Miami on Saturday, two screenings, and then, on Sunday at 1:00, another screening, as well, at the O Cinema. Next week, we’ll be in Sheffield, England, and in Belfast, Ireland, and then on to Vermont. You can check our website, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.