Donald Trump has warned America’s historic enemy Cuba to ‘make a deal’ after cutting off the economically ravaged island from Venezuela’s oil.
In scenes reminiscent of the Cold War, Trump fired off a threat to the government of Cuba after the close ally of Venezuela braced for potential unrest after Nicolas Maduro was captured.
Cuba, a major beneficiary of Venezuelan oil, has now been cut off from those shipments as US forces continue to seize tankers in an effort to control the production, refining and global distribution of the country’s oil products.
The island regularly has blackouts, queues at supermarkets and petrol shortages as it undergoes its worst economic crisis in decades.
But Mr Trump said that Cuba long lived off Venezuelan oil and money and had offered security in return, ‘BUT NOT ANYMORE!’
‘THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!’ the US president said in the post as he spent the weekend at his home in southern Florida.
‘I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.’
Mr Trump did not explain what kind of deal.
(Credits: EPA)
Hours later Cuba’s president Miguel Diaz-Canel responded on X by saying ‘Cuba is a free, independent, and sovereign nation. No one dictates what we do.
‘Cuba does not aggress; it is aggressed upon by the United States for 66 years, and it does not threaten; it prepares, ready to defend the homeland to the last drop of blood.
‘Those who turn everything into a business, even human lives, have no moral authority to point the finger at Cuba in any way, absolutely in any way’.
The Cuban government said 32 of its military personnel were killed during the American operation last weekend that captured Maduro.
The personnel from Cuba’s two main security agencies were in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, as part of an agreement between Cuba and Venezuela.
‘Venezuela doesn’t need protection anymore from the thugs and extortionists who held them hostage for so many years,’ Mr Trump said on Sunday.
‘Venezuela now has the United States of America, the most powerful military in the World (by far!), to protect them, and protect them we will.’
The US president also responded to another account’s social media post predicting that his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, will be president of Cuba.
‘Sounds good to me!’ Mr Trump said.
Mr Trump and top administration officials have taken an increasingly aggressive tone towards Cuba, which had been kept economically afloat by Venezuela.
‘Those who hysterically accuse our nation today do so out of rage at this people’s sovereign decision to choose their political model,’ Mr Diaz-Canel said in his post.
He added that ‘those who blame the Revolution for the severe economic shortages we suffer should be ashamed to keep quiet’ and he railed against the ‘draconian measures’ imposed by the US on Cuba.
Mr Trump has said previously that the Cuban economy, battered by years of a US embargo, would slide further with the ousting of Maduro.
‘It’s going down,’ Mr Trump said of Cuba.
‘It’s going down for the count.’
It came as Nobel Peace Prize organisers said a prize cannot be revoked, transferred or shared – after Donald Trump said he would accept it from Maduro’s rival Maria Corina Machado.
Maria Corina Machado won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for promoting the democratic rights of the people of Venezuela.
What’s next for Venezuela?
What will be crucial to Venezuela’s future will be their vast oil reserves, which are estimated to total more than 300 billion barrels.
Nearly a million barrels a day flowed to China, southern Europe and the US last month.
Trump said: ‘We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies… go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure. We’ll be selling large amounts of oil.’
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC how the US will be ‘running’ things: ‘It’s not running — it’s running policy, the policy.’
‘The goal of the policy is to see changes in Venezuela that are beneficial to the United States, first and foremost, because that’s who we work for, but also we believe beneficial for the people of Venezuela who have suffered tremendously.’
