Remember Cuba, last week’s centre of attention? Lost in the fear and loathing of war in the middle east over the weekend was Donald Trump’s declaration Friday that the U.S. is in talks with Havana and the suggestion of the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a trip to Texas, Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in discussions with Cuban leaders “at a very high level.”
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” the president said. “They have no money. They have no anything right now. But they’re talking to us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
He added: “We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Trump didn’t clarify his comments but seemed to indicate that the situation with Cuba, a communist-run island that has been among Washington’s bitterest adversaries for decades, was coming to a critical point.
The president also said that Cuba “is, to put it mildly, a failed nation” and “they want our help.”
In spite of Trump’s rhetoric, on Sunday Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran and killing of its leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was “heinous.”
Calling the act no less than an “assassination”, the Cuban leader said on X that it was “an unscrupulous violation of all norms of international law and human dignity.”
Cuba has been on Trump’s mind since at least early January, after U.S. forces ousted one of Havana’s closest allies, Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro. Trump suggested in the aftermath of that raid that military action in Cuba might not be necessary because the island’s economy was weak enough – particularly in the absence of oil shipments from Venezuela that stopped after Maduro was taken into custody – to soon collapse on its own.
“We’ve had a lot of years of dealing with Cuba. I’ve been hearing about Cuba since I’m a little boy. But they’re in big trouble,” he said Friday.
Then, noting the exile community from the island living in the U.S., Trump said there could be something coming that “I think (is) very positive for the people that were expelled, or worse, from Cuba and live here.” He did not elaborate.
The U.S. has maintained a strict trade embargo on Cuba since 1962, the year after a failed, CIA-sponsored invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs. Trump nonetheless indicated earlier this month that talks with Cuban officials were underway.
An executive order that Trump signed in late January pledged to impose tariffs on countries providing oil to Cuba, threatening to further cripple a country already plagued by a deepening energy crisis, though U.S. authorities have since indicated that oil from Venezuela can be sold to Cuban interests in some cases.
Meanwhile, 40-plus U.S. civil society organizations sent a letter to Congress on Friday asking that it “press the Trump administration to reverse its aggressive policy towards Cuba” and saying that efforts to cut oil shipments to the Caribbean island would spark a humanitarian collapse.
Signees included the Alliance of Baptists, ActionAid USA and the Presbyterian Church.
“Policies that deliberately impose hunger and mass hardship on millions of civilians constitute a form of collective punishment, and as such are a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” the letter reads.
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