RFK Jr.: His Past with Cuba, Fidel and his Criticism of the US

By Alfredo Prieto on February 27, 2025

The Secretary of Health and Human Resources of the Trump Administration has visited the island more than once in the past, met with Fidel Castro and expressed criticism of his country’s hostile policy towards Cuba.

After graduating from Harvard University, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. studied at the London School of Economics and received his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law.

He then attended Pace University School of Law, New York, where he obtained a Master’s Degree in Environmental Law. From 1986 to 2018 he was a member of the faculty of the School of Law at that institution and co-founded Pace’s Environmental Litigation Clinic, an entity that represents Hudson Riverkeeper. This is a non-profit organization based in Ossining, New York, dedicated to protecting the Hudson River, one of the most emblematic rivers in American culture.

As Riverkeeper’s chief prosecutor, Kennedy brought more than 150 lawsuits against corporations polluting the river. He also inspired the creation of more than 100 global Waterkeeper organizations and an umbrella group: Waterkeeper Alliance.

For this type of action, Time magazine named him one of its “Heroes for the Planet”. “For me,” he told Time, “the environment cannot be separated from the economy, housing, civil rights and human rights. How we distribute the goods of the earth is the best measure of our democracy. It’s not just about defending fish and birds. It’s about human rights.”

This is the RFK Jr. who arrived in Cuba for the first time in February 1996, together with his brother Michael Kennedy —president of Citizens Energy Corporation, a Boston-based alternative energy company—, as part of a delegation of environmentalists. On that occasion he met with Fidel Castro.

“More than three decades after the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Michael Kennedy came face to face with the man who was their uncles’ most bitter enemy during the Cold War,” notes researcher Peter Kornbluh. And he adds: “The group was there to discuss Cuba’s energy needs and to urge Castro to abandon his nuclear program in favor of safer alternative energy sources.”

They visited the Juraguá plant at a time when US lawmakers and environmentalists were showing growing concerns about its safety and construction standards, which they argued were very similar to those of Chernobyl.

On his return to the United States, RFK Jr. claimed that his trip had contributed to the Cuban government’s decision to discontinue construction of the nuclear power plant. The press reported it as follows:

Cuban President Fidel Castro, who has long been firm in his stance on the construction of a nuclear power plant in his island nation, is now willing to consider other sources of fuel, two of President Kennedy’s nephews said. “We asked him not to build it, and in the end he stopped construction.”

On that trip, the two brothers gave Fidel Castro previously top secret US documents about a secret agreement between the Kennedy Administration and Cuba, a move that aborted the assassination attempt in Dallas and which has been investigated and discussed by historians such as Peter Kornbluh and William Leogrande in Back Channel to Cuba..

“Castro thanked them for the documents,” Kornbluh says, ‘and shared with them both his ’impression that [President Kennedy] intended after the Missile Crisis to change the framework‘ of US-Cuban relations. ’It is regrettable,‘ said Fidel Castro, ’that things happened the way they did and that he could not do what he wanted to do.’”

In 2001, RFK Jr. continued to be an activist, for which he was sentenced to 30 days in prison for trying to stop the US Navy bombing on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. Joining the movement, he and other environmentalists argued that the bombing was damaging the environment and the health of the island’s inhabitants. Several officers testified at the trial that their incursion with their fellow campaigners forced them to stop the military exercises.

“As soon as the boat entered the danger zone, I had to stop firing,” said Lieutenant Commander Russell Gottfried. And he had had to stop for two and a half hours while security officers searched for the group, hidden in some mangroves.

The Vieques base, a Navy firing range since the 1940s, after a protracted struggle by the people was finally closed in May 2003.

In 2014 RFK Jr. returned to Cuba. On this occasion he undertook an incursion into the Jardines de la Reina, in the south of the island, a tourist enclave famous for its marine reserve and for having been declared a National Park in 2010. There Kennedy did another of the things he knows how to do well: diving in the crystal-clear waters of the sea, close to sharks and other species, but this time not alone, but together with two of his children.

In an article for the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency after the trip to the Jardines, RFK Jr. dabbled on the subject of the embargo, writing that it was a “monumental failure” and calling for a “warmer” relationship with the Cubans.

Set against the backdrop of the thaw, after it was announced that the United States and Cuba would seek to normalize relations, the text argued that lifting the embargo would have broader positive effects on international relations for the United States, an idea usually espoused by the liberal mainstream at the time, including President Obama.

“One of the reasons our global prestige and moral authority are diminished,” he noted, ”is that the whole embargo issue only emphasizes our distorted relationship with Cuba. That relationship is historically fraught with powerful ironies that make the United States appear hypocritical to the rest of the world.”

In short, what he thought at the time could be summarized in six fundamental points:

• President Obama decided to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba “after five decades of a misguided policy for which my uncle John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, my father, were responsible, and which was reinforced after the establishment of a US embargo by the Eisenhower administration in 1960”.
• The pretext of democracy and human rights to justify hostility towards Cuba is not credible. Indeed, “there are real tyrants in the world and many countries with a worse human rights record than Cuba […] where torture, forced disappearances, religious intolerance, suppression of freedom of expression and assembly, medieval oppression of women, fraudulent elections and extrajudicial executions are government practices, and yet they are allies of the United States”.
• “While we accuse Cuba of imprisoning and mistreating political prisoners, we subject prisoners to torture, many of whom were innocent, according to the Pentagon’s own confessions, including simulated drownings, illegal arrests and imprisonment without trial in Guantanamo cells.”
• “It is ironic that the same policymakers who say Castro should be punished for human rights violations and abuses in Cuban prisons also say the United States has reason to mistreat our own prisoners in prison” [in Guantánamo].
• “While we accuse Cuba of not allowing its citizens to travel freely to the United States, we prevent our own citizens from traveling freely to Cuba.”
• “It seems absurd to pursue a foreign policy that repeats a strategy that has been a monumental failure for six decades.”

In an interview in 2023, RFK Jr. praised the Cuban health system, going so far as to say that it produced “healthier citizens than the United States.” Shocking perhaps to many, but not new. He had posted in 2019: “We [the United States] are far from being the healthiest country in the world, ranking 35th out of 169 economies according to the factors that contribute to overall health. #Cuba ranked 5 places above us, making it the only nation not classified as ‘high income’ by the World Bank to occupy that position.”

He also alluded to the time he and his two children spent with one of the protagonists of the Missile Crisis two years before his death. He characterized him then as an “incredibly charming” man. And he was emphatic: “He was very, very kind to me and my family.” Adding: “He had a very open and committed mind, I talked to him about a million things,” including “the United States’ attempts to assassinate him.” “It was flattering for me to see that thirty years after my father’s death, he is still held in such high esteem by Fidel Castro,” Michael Kennedy had observed on that 1996 trip.

“Kennedy’s acceptance of Cuba’s socialist regime could hurt his efforts to attract Republican voters to his third-party presidential bid,” they said during the last elections.

But it didn’t happen. RFK Jr. gave up on launching himself as a third-party candidate and, after having his image turned upside down and experiencing the repudiation of his own people, he was ratified by the Senate as Secretary of Health and Human Resources of the new Administration.

Donald Trump didn’t care.

Alfredo Prieto is a researcher, editor and journalist. He has worked as Editor-in-Chief of Cuadernos de Nuestra América, Caminos, Temas y Cultura and Desarrollo, and has researched and taught at several universities.

Source: Cubainformación, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English