NY Times defends ‘real and accurate’ reporting Rubio labeled ‘fake’

The New York Times is defending its reporting that the Trump administration is seeking to oust Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel after Secretary Marco Rubio labeled the story as “fake.”

The newspaper reported on Monday that a push to remove Cuba’s head of state was happening as U.S. and Cuban officials are engaged in talks regarding the future of the country, citing four people familiar with the negotiations.

Rubio, a second-generation American of Cuban descent, dismissed the reporting as inaccurate in a Tuesday post on the social platform X.

“The reason so many in US media keep putting out fake stories like this one is because they continue to rely on charlatans & liars claiming to be in the know as their sources,” he wrote.

New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander responded directly to Rubio in a statement the following day, implying the State Department was aware of the reporting before it was published.

“Our journalists reached out to your State Department for comment well before publication and received no disagreement with the information we were bringing to light,” Stadtlander said. “Neither you nor anyone else has presented a factual dispute to the reporting.”

“Our reporting is real, and accurate,” he concluded.

Tensions between the U.S. and Cuba have been escalating in recent days, prompted by President Trump’s renewed threats to take over the island.

“Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “You want to know the truth? They’re a very weakened nation now.”

The U.S. imposed an oil blockade on Cuba in January, plunging the country into a worsening economic and energy crisis that resulted in the collapse of its electrical grid on Monday. The collapse left nearly 11 million people without power for 29 hours before being partially restored.

One source told the Times that some Trump administration officials view removing Díaz-Canel, who they consider a hardliner unlikely to support reform, as a possible pathway to economic changes in the country.

With the prospect of military intervention similar to the operation in Venezuela on the table, the Cuban president has vowed to meet any U.S. aggression with “impregnable resistance.”

“The US publicly threatens Cuba, almost daily, with overthrowing the constitutional order by force. And it uses an outrageous pretext: the harsh limitations of the weakened economy that they have attacked and sought to isolate for more than six decades,” he wrote in a translated post on X.

“They intend and announce plans to seize the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to strangle to make us surrender. Only in this way can the fierce economic war be explained, which is applied as collective punishment against the entire people,” Díaz-Canel continued.

Rubio has not ruled out relaxing the U.S. embargo in exchange for reform, while also maintaining that Cuba needs “new people charge.”

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