Cuba’s leader on Monday reacted defiantly to President Donald Trump’s threats to “make a deal” or pay the price in the aftermath of key ally Nicolas Maduro’s ouster in a US military raid.
Trump has been ramping up pressure on Cuba, one of the few Latin American countries still run by an authoritarian leftist administration after Venezuelan leader Maduro’s capture on January 3.
“We’re talking with Cuba,” Trump said aboard Air Force One on Sunday, hours after urging Havana to do a deal to head off unspecified US actions.
The Republican president, who says Washington is now effectively running Venezuela, earlier vowed to cut off all oil and money Caracas had been providing to ailing Cuba.
“THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA - ZERO!” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
“I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” he said, without specifying what kind of deal he was promoting or what would happen if Cuba refused to negotiate.
Cuba, which is struggling through its worst economic crisis in decades, has reacted defiantly to the US threats even as it reels from the loss of a key source of economic support from Caracas.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel denied Monday being in talks with Washington, saying there are “no conversations with the US government except for technical contacts in the area of migration.”
On Sunday, Diaz-Canel vowed that the Caribbean island’s residents were “ready to defend the homeland to the last drop of blood.”
Cuba has been a thorn in the side of the United States since the revolution that swept communist Fidel Castro to power in 1959.
The deployment of Soviet nuclear missile sites on the island triggered the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when Washington and Moscow took the world to the brink of nuclear war.
During his first presidential term, Trump walked back a detente with Cuba launched by his predecessor Barack Obama.
Immediately after the US capture of Maduro in a dramatic raid in Caracas, Trump stated that Cuba was “ready to fall.”
He noted that the island, which has been plagued by blackouts due to crippling fuel shortages, would find it hard to “hold out” without heavily subsidized Venezuelan oil.
The Financial Times last week reported that Mexican oil exports to Cuba had surpassed those of Venezuela last year.
Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a child of Cuban immigrants who is a sworn foe of the communist government, has long had Havana in his sights.
“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned at least a little bit,” he told reporters on January 3, after Maduro’s capture and transfer to the United States on drug trafficking and weapons charges.
Aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump referred to the generations of Cubans, like Rubio’s parents, who had fled the island to the United States.
“Most importantly, right now, we’re going to take care of the people that came from Cuba, that are American citizens, or in our country,” Trump said, without saying how he would achieve that.
He also reposted a message that jokingly suggested Rubio could serve as president of Cuba.
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