DeSantis says he, unlike Biden, wouldn’t allow Cuba-bound Russian warships within sight of Florida’s coastline

In a Hollywood firehouse 234 miles north of Havana, it was a silver platter question that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had no trouble answering.

“We’re hearing that Russian warships are passing within 30 miles of Key Largo on the way to Havana,” a reporter said. Could the governor comment?

The question was a bit of an aside from the occasion on Friday, which was a gubernatorial inspection tour of Broward County cities hit hard by two days of relentless rains. The governor, along with Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and Florida Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue were discussing how much better the state had performed this year as opposed to April 12, 2023, when a surprise eight-hour rain bomb dumped more than 2 feet of water on Broward County.

And the governor, an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination this year, acknowledged that the arrival this week in Havana Harbor of a small Russian flotilla that included a nuclear submarine and another ship armed with hypersonic missiles was an issue above his pay grade. But the Russians’ visit was not beyond a critique of the man in currently charge of U.S. military responses, President Joe Biden.

“Well, I’m the Governor of Florida and I’m not the commander in chief,” DeSantis said. “But if my responsibilities were different, that would not be something that we would allow to be happening.”

“They are not going to be deterred by a president wandering around aimlessly at the G7,” he added, referring to this week’s conference of allied leaders in Italy. “They are going to be deterred because they know that that’s not somebody that you want to mess with. So we’re failing as a country with the deterrent capability, and I think it starts at the top with the president of the United States.”

“So I think it is problematic,” he said. “I think that history has shown that these bad actors, they respond to strength and they are deterred by strength. They are not going to be deterred by weakness. They are not going to be deterred by confusion.”

Pentagon “monitoring”

The Pentagon, for its part, said earlier this week that U.S. military forces are monitoring the situation and believes the Russian presence — as well as exercises that the flotilla performed in the Atlantic —  “don’t pose a threat to the United States.”

That’s according to a response given by Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh to reporters at a Defense Department briefing while the rains fell in Florida.

“We’ve been tracking the Russians’ plans for this,” Singh said. “This is not a surprise. We’ve seen them do these types of port calls before, and these are routine naval visits that we’ve seen under different administrations.”

She had no immediate information about the last time a similar Russian flotilla visited Havana.

“It certainly wouldn’t come as a surprise to us if we see more activity around the United States,” she told the reporters. “They do have a global exercise that will culminate this fall.”

In the meantime, the U.S. Navy’s Second and Fourth Fleets, the U.S. Coast Guard in the Atlantic, and a Canadian Joint Task Force Atlantic “are conducting routine operations throughout the Atlantic,” she said.

“We are going to continue to monitor what’s happening in the region.”