“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 being in talks with Washington, saying there are “no conversations with the US government except for technical contacts in the area of migration”.
‘To the last drop’
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 because of crippling fuel shortages, would find it hard to “hold out” without heavily subsidised Venezuelan oil.
The Financial Times last week reported that Mexican oil exports to Cuba had surpassed those of Venezuela last year.
Role for Rubio?
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.
At the weekend, 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.
- Agence France-Presse
