“The current secretary of state was not born in Cuba, has never been to Cuba, and knows nothing about Cuba,” Rodríguez said in a sit-down interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. Rubio and U.S. officials have defended their aggressive stance against Cuba, accusing its leaders of running a dictatorship. In the days before leaving office, Biden had moved to lift the U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. The former Florida senator has admitted that his interest in targeting leftist Latin American leaders has been personal. His parents are Cuban immigrants who arrived in Miami in 1956, shortly before Fidel Castro’s 1959 communist revolution.