Cuba has opened talks with the US government, President Miguel Diaz-Canel said yesterday, as an oil blockade imposed by US President Donald Trump pushes the Communist-run nation deeper into economic crisis.
“These talks have been aimed at finding solutions through dialogue to the bilateral differences we have between the two nations,” Diaz-Canel said in a video aired on state television.
Diaz-Canel said he hoped the negotiations would move the two long-time rivals “away from confrontation.”
Cuba is growing increasingly desperate. The Caribbean nation’s citizens, already exhausted by years of economic crisis and shortages, now live the majority of their days without electricity. Rising prices, strictly rationed fuel and medicine shortages have pushed many to the tipping point.
Since the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and removed from power Cuba’s most important foreign benefactor in January, Trump has cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba and threatened to slap tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba.
Trump in recent weeks had made a series of statements, saying Cuba was on the verge of collapse or eager to make a deal with the United States.
On Monday he said Cuba may be subject to a “friendly takeover,” then added, “it may not be a friendly takeover.”
Cubans on the streets of Havana welcomed the news as a possible solution to the power blackouts, which this week provoked protests in which Reuters observed Havana residents banging on kitchen pots in the dark.
Cuba said it was interested in conducting the talks “on the basis of equality and respect for the political systems of both states, and for the sovereignty and self-determination of our governments,” Diaz-Canel said.
But he made clear in his remarks that the oil blockade was taking its toll.
No fuel has entered Cuba in three months, Diaz-Canel said in a subsequent press conference with the Cuban media on Friday, resulting in a decline in diesel and fuel oil reserves that have made Cuba’s electrical grid increasingly “unstable,” he said.
Trump said leaders of Cuba should agree to a deal and that could easily be done, reiterating his previous remarks after Havana confirmed that negotiations were under way.
“As the President stated, we are talking to Cuba, whose leaders should make a deal, which Trump believes ‘would be very easily made’,” a White House official said, on condition of anonymity
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