Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) refused to rap about Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s trip to Cuba during his tour of the Sunday morning shows, but he still had plenty to say about the Carters and their vacation down South, calling it the trip “hypocritical.”
“I won’t rap it, but first of all Jay-z needs to get informed,” Rubio told host Jon Karl during ABC’s “This Week.”
“One of his heroes was Che Guevara,” Rubio continued. “Guevara was a racist that wrote extensively about the superiority of white Europeans over people of African descent, so he should inform himself on the guy that he’s propping up.”
Rubio also derided the rapper for not visiting the Cuban rapper Angel Yunier Remon Arzuaga in jail and the many others oppressed by the Cuban regime.
“If Jay-Z was truly interested in the true state of affairs in Cuba, he would have met people that are being oppressed, including a hip-hop artist in Cuba who is right now being oppressed and persecuted and is undergoing a hunger strike because of his political lyrics,” the Florida senator told Karl.
“Jay-Z wears a shirt of a man who was a racist and a killer,” Rubio argued on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
‘They should have met with some of the people suffering there not simply smoke cigars and take a stroll down the street,” he continued his tirade on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
But despite his criticism of the rapper, Rubio called it “Jay-Z’s issue,” and said the real problem behind the celebrities’ trip to Cuba was that it revealed major flaws in U.S. travel policies.
“The travel policies need to be tightened, because they’re being abused,” he sad to Karl. “These are tourist trips, and they are – what they’re doing is providing hard currency and funding so that a tyrannical regime can maintain its grip on the island of Cuba, and I think that’s wrong.”
“If they didn’t violate [the embargo], it exposes the ridiculousness of the laws we have in place,” he told host Candy Crowley during “State of the Union.”
“If Cuba wants normal relations, there are certain things they need to do like become a normal country that respects the rights of their citizens,” Rubio told Gregory. “I thought it was hypocritical of Beyoncé and Jay-Z to go down to Cuba.”
Last week, Rubio and other members of Congress including Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), demanded to know how the Carters managed to make a trip to Havana, Cuba with the U.S. Trade Embargo on Cuba that bans tourist trips still in place.
The Treasury Department claimed the couple’s vacation was authorized as “educational travel.”
