Cuba’s leader has 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 that 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.
Yesterday President Miguel Diaz-Canel (pictured) denied being in talks with Washington, saying that there are "no conversations with the US government except for technical contacts in the area of migration”.
"As history demonstrates, in order for the relations between the United States and Cuba to advance, they must be based in international law instead of hostility, threats and economic coercion,” Diaz-Canel said on X.
On Sunday, he 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.
Tensions are rapidly escalating between the two neighbouring nations, just 90 miles apart across the Straits of Florida.
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 subsidised Venezuelan oil.
The Financial Times reported last week 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.
Trump also said on Sunday that he "wanted to take care of” Cubans who were "forced out” of Cuba or who "left under duress,” calling them "great citizens of the United States”.
Diaz-Canel lashed back, saying yesterday that his country’s citizens had been enticed to migrate to the US under laws that favoured Cuban migrants, and now were suffering the consequences of that "failed policy”.
"They are victims of a change in policy towards migrants and the betrayal of Miami politicians,” he said.