Roberto Azcorra Consuegra, initially misidentified by the Cuban government as one of the men detained following a shooting off the island’s coast with the country’s coast guard, was among a group of Cuban exiles that attended a vigil held at Versailles Cuban Cuisine Restaurant on Thursday, February 26, 2026.
Pedro Portal
pportal@miamiherald.com
A small crowd gathered outside Cuban restaurant Versailles Thursday night to pray for the men killed and injured during a shootout with the Cuban Coast Guard off the island’s coast.
As patrons dined inside, a man wearing a Cuban flag paced along Southwest Eighth Street with an “assassins and terrorists” sign featuring photos of Raul Castro and Cuban leader Miguel Diaz-Canel. Agustin Acosta said he was there to pay “tribute” to the men killed and captured.
“It was a crime, a massacre,” he told the Miami Herald in Spanish.
A group of Cuban exiles including Agustin Acosta attended a vigil held at Versailles Cuban Cuisine Restaurant after four people were killed when gunfire erupted at sea between a Florida boat and the Cuban Coast Guard, on Thursday, February 26, 2026. Pedro Portal pportal@miamiherald.com
The confrontation happened Wednesday one nautical mile northeast of the El Pino channel in Cayo Falcones, off the northern coast of the Villa Clara province in central Cuba, according to Cuban government officials.
Havana says a group of 10 Cuban nationals came aboard a boat registered in Florida armed and planning a “terrorist infiltration.” The Trump administration is investigating the allegations, but has said little beyond acknowledging that two of the men shot in the confrontation were U.S. citizens.
Roberto Azcorra Consuegra, who was initially on the Cuban government’s list of the people detained but was actually in Miami, came to show his support for the men in Cuba’s custody. Consuegra said he knew most of the men on the boat from gathering at places like Versailles.
He said he hopes the U.S. government has a “strong reaction.”
“This is the moment to give el punto final, ya,” he said.
A group of Cuban exiles including Agustin Acosta (left) and Santiago Ferran, attended a vigil held at Versailles Cuban Cuisine Restaurant after four people were killed when gunfire erupted at sea between a Florida boat and the Cuban Coast Guard, on Thursday, February 26, 2026. Pedro Portal pportal@miamiherald.com
The modest Thursday night crowd brought signs and Cuban and U.S. flags. They chanted libertad, for a moment. They talked about decades of repression on the island. They had questions, and expectations of a full investigation by the U.S. government.
“I have a lot of pain,” said Santiago Ferrer, who has lived in the United States for 25 years.
Ferrer, who still has family in Cuba, said he’s only ever been able to kiss his grandchildren through the phone.
He described Wednesday’s confrontation as history repeating itself with the Cuban regime. He said the government chooses to “assassinate los muchachos Cubanos.”
“Once again Cuba cries,” he said, his eyes watering.
A group of Cuban exiles including Ramón Saúl Sánchez, leader of the Democracia organization, attended a vigil held at Versailles Cuban Cuisine Restaurant after four people were killed when gunfire erupted at sea between a Florida boat and the Cuban Coast Guard, on Thursday, February 26, 2026. Pedro Portal pportal@miamiherald.com
Cuban exile Ramón Saúl Sánchez, president of Movimiento Democracia, was at Versailles “to mourn those killed and to pray for the end of violence in Cuba.”
Sanchez, who has organized about 24 “flotillas” to honor Cuban victims and protest the government, said the group of men likely faced 90 miles of rough seas on their travel to the island and had to evade the U.S. vessels before ultimately finding themselves face to face with the Cuban coast guard.
Michelle Marchante covers the pulse of healthcare in South Florida and also the City of Coral Gables. Before that, she covered the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, crime, education, entertainment and other topics in South Florida for the Herald as a breaking news reporter. She recently won first place in the health reporting category in the 2025 Sunshine State Awards for her coverage of Steward Health’s bankruptcy. An investigative series about the abrupt closure of a Miami heart transplant program led Michelle and her colleagues to be recognized as finalists in two 2024 Florida Sunshine State Award categories. She also won second place in the 73rd annual Green Eyeshade Awards for her consumer-focused healthcare stories and was part of the team of reporters who won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for the Miami Herald’s breaking news coverage of the Surfside building collapse. Michelle graduated with honors from Florida International University and was a 2025 National Press Foundation Covering Workplace Mental Health fellow and a 2020-2021 Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism fellow. Support my work with a digital subscription
Feb 23 (Reuters) – Canada said on Monday it plans to provide assistance to Cuba while the island grapples with fuel shortages after Washington moved to choke off Cuba’s oil supplies.
Washington has escalated a pressure campaign against the Communist-run island and long-time U.S. foe in recent weeks.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to block all oil from reaching Cuba, including that from ally Venezuela, pushing up prices for food and transportation and prompting severe fuel shortages and hours of blackouts.
“We are preparing a plan to assist. We are not prepared at this point to provide any further details of an announcement,” Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand said on Monday, without giving details on what such an assistance will include.
The U.N. has warned that if Cuba’s energy needs are not met, it could cause a humanitarian crisis. Canada said last week it was monitoring the situation in Cuba and was concerned about “the increasing risk of a humanitarian crisis” there.
Emboldened by the U.S. military’s seizure of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a deadly raid in January, Trump has repeatedly talked of acting against Cuba and pressuring its leadership.
Washington and Ottawa have also had tensions under Trump over issues like trade tariffs, Trump’s rhetoric towards Greenland, Ottawa’s attempt to warm ties with Beijing and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks that “middle powers” should act together to avoid being victimized by U.S. hegemony.
Trump has said “Cuba will be failing pretty soon,” adding that Venezuela, once the island’s top supplier, has not recently sent oil or money to Cuba.
The U.N. human rights office has said the U.S. raid in which Maduro was seized was a violation of international law. Human rights experts cast Trump’s foreign policy and his focus on exploiting Venezuelan oil and squeezing Cuba as echoing an imperialist approach.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Michael Perry)
For the past five months, a Brevard County woman has been doing everything she can to get her father back home to Palm Bay.”He’s just completely and emotionally spent,” Sheena Allende-Smith said.Her father, 58-year-old Jose Manuel Allende, came to the United States legally from Cuba through the Freedom Flights, a large-scale operation that brought hundreds of thousands of Cubans to the U.S. He has an American driver’s license and a Social Security card.However, a decades-old criminal history and lack of citizenship led to a deportation order.WESH 2 first told you about his case in September, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him in his driveway.Initially, he was held at “Alligator Alcatraz” for more than two weeks. Allende-Smith said ICE agents threw away her father’s dentures when he arrived, and he has not been able to get a replacement while detained.”‘Alligator Alcatraz’ has 24-hour LED lights on, so there’s no way to know what time of day it is,” Allende-Smith said. “There’s no way to know if it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner because they’re feeding you the same foods for every single meal.”Her father is now being held at the Federal Detention Center in Miami.”He is not allowed outside at FDC. ICE rents the 11th floor from the federal prison, and they are not allowed recreation time,” Allende-Smith said. “They are not allowed outdoor time.”Allende-Smith said she hired an attorney, and they were able to secure a motion to stay.”Which means the deportation order is removed from his record. We also got a motion to reopen his case approved. That included 375 pages of records — 20 years of tax returns, medical records, proof that he owns a business, proof that he owns his home and letters from the community,” Allende-Smith said.She said he should have been released by now, but he remains in custody.”He is now in legal status because they removed the deportation order and granted the motion to reopen his case,” Allende-Smith said. “We applied for his green card, and it’s pending. He can’t complete the green card process as long as he’s being detained. The judge says it’s not his jurisdiction. Homeland Security says they’re detaining him. Then the judge says if they continue detaining him, we’re deporting him April 6 if he’s not released by then.”The family is now up against the clock, hiring a federal attorney and working to obtain a signature for his release.”My dad is a good man. Of course, every daughter says that about their father, but I really mean it. My father is a man of faith, and he has helped this community so much, quietly. He has helped so many people — elderly, veterans, disabled. He’s done work on their houses for free,” Allende-Smith said. “There’s no reason for him to be there.”
PALM BAY, Fla. —
For the past five months, a Brevard County woman has been doing everything she can to get her father back home to Palm Bay.
“He’s just completely and emotionally spent,” Sheena Allende-Smith said.
Her father, 58-year-old Jose Manuel Allende, came to the United States legally from Cuba through the Freedom Flights, a large-scale operation that brought hundreds of thousands of Cubans to the U.S. He has an American driver’s license and a Social Security card.
However, a decades-old criminal history and lack of citizenship led to a deportation order.
WESH 2 first told you about his case in September, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him in his driveway.
Initially, he was held at “Alligator Alcatraz” for more than two weeks. Allende-Smith said ICE agents threw away her father’s dentures when he arrived, and he has not been able to get a replacement while detained.
“‘Alligator Alcatraz’ has 24-hour LED lights on, so there’s no way to know what time of day it is,” Allende-Smith said. “There’s no way to know if it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner because they’re feeding you the same foods for every single meal.”
Her father is now being held at the Federal Detention Center in Miami.
“He is not allowed outside at FDC. ICE rents the 11th floor from the federal prison, and they are not allowed recreation time,” Allende-Smith said. “They are not allowed outdoor time.”
Allende-Smith said she hired an attorney, and they were able to secure a motion to stay.
“Which means the deportation order is removed from his record. We also got a motion to reopen his case approved. That included 375 pages of records — 20 years of tax returns, medical records, proof that he owns a business, proof that he owns his home and letters from the community,” Allende-Smith said.
She said he should have been released by now, but he remains in custody.
“He is now in legal status because they removed the deportation order and granted the motion to reopen his case,” Allende-Smith said. “We applied for his green card, and it’s pending. He can’t complete the green card process as long as he’s being detained. The judge says it’s not his jurisdiction. Homeland Security says they’re detaining him. Then the judge says if they continue detaining him, we’re deporting him April 6 if he’s not released by then.”
The family is now up against the clock, hiring a federal attorney and working to obtain a signature for his release.
“My dad is a good man. Of course, every daughter says that about their father, but I really mean it. My father is a man of faith, and he has helped this community so much, quietly. He has helped so many people — elderly, veterans, disabled. He’s done work on their houses for free,” Allende-Smith said. “There’s no reason for him to be there.”
Feb 22 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court is set to explore legal questions arising from the fraught history of U.S.-Cuban relations when it considers the scope of a 1996 law that lets U.S. nationals seek compensation for property confiscated by the communist-led Cuban government.
The justices hear arguments on Monday in two cases centered on the federal law called the Helms-Burton Act, one involving U.S. oil major ExxonMobil and the other involving the cruise lines Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian Cruise Line and MSC Cruises.
One of the law’s provisions, called Title III, allows for lawsuits in U.S. courts against entities that “traffic” in property confiscated by the Cuban government after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959.
While the two cases focus on distinct legal issues, both raise the question of just how powerful a remedy Congress intended Title III to be. In both cases, the Supreme Court has the opportunity to eliminate barriers that claimants face in bringing Helms-Burton Act lawsuits.
The justices have never before interpreted Title III, which Congress authorized the U.S. president to suspend if deemed “necessary to the national interests of the United States.”
Title III was long dormant due to presidential decisions to suspend it. But President Donald Trump, who has taken a hard line toward Cuba, lifted that suspension during his first term in office, unleashing a wave of about 40 lawsuits filed in 2019 and 2020 that have slowly made their way through the courts.
Trump’s administration has declared Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security, cutting off the flow of Venezuelan oil to the Caribbean island nation and threatening to slap tariffs on any country supplying it with fuel.
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN CLAIMS
Following the revolution, Cuba’s new communist government nationalized U.S. property that now is worth billions of dollars, including factories, sugar mills, oil refineries and power plants.
The Helms-Burton Act formalized the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba that had been in effect by presidential order since President John Kennedy’s administration in the 1960s.
Title III created a legal remedy for U.S. nationals whose property was confiscated. Such plaintiffs can seek enhanced damages in federal courts from entities that knowingly use the property, including both Cuban state-owned entities and multinational companies.
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all suspended Title III, seeking to avoid diplomatic conflicts with allies like Canada and Spain whose companies have invested in Cuba, before Trump lifted the suspension in 2019. The State Department said at the time that Trump’s move would “ratchet up pressure on the Cuban government” and “penalize those who benefit from the rightful property of Americans.”
In one of the Supreme Court cases, Exxon is seeking more than $1 billion in compensation from CIMEX, a Cuban state-owned firm, for oil and gas assets seized in 1960. In the other case, a small company that built docks in Havana’s port prior to the revolution is seeking compensation from the four cruise lines, whose ships have used the terminal.
Exxon, which filed its suit in Washington in 2019, has asked the justices to reverse a lower court’s 2024 decision finding that Cuban state-owned enterprises facing Helms-Burton Act claims can raise the defense of foreign sovereign immunity. That legal doctrine generally shields foreign governments and their agents from being sued in U.S. courts.
The lower court’s decision “imposes yet another in a long line of barriers to recovery for victims of the Castro government’s illegal confiscations,” Exxon’s lawyers said in a 2024 court filing.
CIMEX has argued in court filings that the 2024 decision should be upheld because it “both respects and safeguards congressional judgment in this sensitive area.”
Legal experts said the 2024 decision and other rulings interpreting Helms-Burton have made it costly and time-consuming for U.S. businesses to seek compensation from Cuban entities.
“The amount of time and resources that has been required is overwhelming for a lot of claimants,” said Washington lawyer Jared Butcher, who represents clients in commercial litigation.
The other case being argued on Monday does not implicate sovereign immunity because the cruise company defendants are private companies, rather than state-owned entities. At issue in that case is whether a Helms-Burton Act claimant must establish that it would have a present-day property interest in the assets at issue if they had not been nationalized.
Havana Docks Corporation, a U.S. firm that built docks in Havana’s port prior to the revolution, sued the cruise lines in federal court in Florida in 2019. Castro revoked the company’s legal right to the docks shortly after coming to power.
The four cruise operators used the docks from 2016 to 2019, after Obama eased travel restrictions on Cuba. In a joint court filing, the companies said it defies common sense that they “should pay hundreds of millions of dollars for following the executive branch’s lead in reopening travel to Cuba.”
A federal judge found the cruise companies liable for a combined $440 million, saying they had trafficked in confiscated property. An appeals court threw out those judgments last year, highlighting the difficulties Helms-Burton Act claimants face.
“Plaintiffs are having a hard time recovering under the Helms-Burton Act for a wide variety of reasons, and it’s probably more difficult to recover than Congress had anticipated when it passed the act in 1996,” said Vanderbilt Law School professor Ingrid Brunk. “But that’s not an argument that means every plaintiff should win.”
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe in New Orleans; Editing by Amy Stevens and Will Dunham)
On Thursday, Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts introduced a bill to the House of Representatives that calls for the end of the United States’ 64-year-old embargo against Cuba.
Since Maduro’s capture, the U.S. has cut off all shipments of Venezuelan oil to Cuba. President Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on countries that send oil to the island.
The oil deprivation in Cuba has sparked concern from international bodies, including the United Nations, which warned that the holdout would strain an already-fragile fuel situation and create a humanitarian crisis in the country.
“For 60 years, we have been waiting for [the] embargo to do what politicians in Washington claim it will do — deliver freedom or democracy to the people of Cuba. It has failed,” McGovern wrote in his newly introduced bill.
“It’s time to throw away the old, obsolete, failed policies of the past and try something different. Let’s focus on the people of Cuba — and let’s treat them like human beings who want to live their lives in dignity and freedom. The Cuban people — not politicians in Washington — ought to decide their own leaders and their own future.”
The Massachusetts representative’s proposal mirrors a similar bill that was put forth to the U.S. Senate by Oregon Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) in 2025.
Additionally, McGovern criticized the seemingly hypocritical nature that the blockade has on Trump’s desire to curb immigration in the U.S.
“The Trump administration says they want to curtail migration, but their own hard line approach only incentivizes migration to the United States by making living conditions worse in Cuba,” he wrote.
“Not only is the embargo absurdly ineffective — it is counterproductive, hurting the very people it purports to help. It’s not Cuban elites who are harmed by our policies — it’s regular people and families who are denied food, medicine, and basic goods. We ought to use diplomacy and engagement to achieve our goals.”
McGovern isn’t new to looking for an end of the embargo, his advocacy on the topic dates back to at least 2000.
At the turn of the century, he penned an Op-Ed in The Times calling for former President Bill Clinton to put an end to the Cold War politics looming over the two countries’ strain.
“The president should … declare to the Cuban people that the Cold War is finally over,” McGovern wrote in his 2000 article. “He should announce that he will use his executive power to normalize diplomatic relations, lift the travel restrictions imposed on U.S. citizens who want to travel to Cuba and waive as much of the outdated economic embargo as current law allows.”
To help curb the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding in Cuba, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum sent two of her country’s naval ships filled with humanitarian aid to the island last week, despite Trump’s tariff threats.
In another effort to send aid to Cuba, an international coalition is preparing to send a flotilla with resources in March to the Caribbean archipelago. Named after “Nuestra América,” the 1891 essay by Cuban independence leader José Marti, the “Nuestra América Flotilla” mission is inspired by the Global Sumud Flotilla, which attempted to get aid to Gaza last year amid Israel’s blockade of the Palestine coastline.
The coalition includes the political and grassroots organizations Progressive International, the People’s Forum and Code Pink, among others.
“We are sailing to Cuba, bringing critical humanitarian aid for its people,” the organizers wrote on the official flotilla website. “The Trump administration is strangling the island, cutting off fuel, flights, and critical supplies for survival. The consequences are lethal, for newborns and parents, for the elderly and the sick.”
People walk past garbage discarded on a street in Havana on February 4, 2026.
YAMIL LAGE
AFP via Getty Images
In Velasco, a town in the eastern Cuban province of Holguín, a man was buried in a cardboard box, his body carted on a wheelbarrow to the cemetery because of a lack of both of wooden coffins and fuel.
In the capital city of Holguín, residents are cooking with wood and coal outside their homes, on sidewalks and empty streets.
In Guantánamo, a local radio station announced that bread distributed through ration cards will now be baked in wood-fired ovens and that the government will sell residents coal for cooking.
And all over Havana, neighborhoods are covered in rotting garbage piles that haven’t been picked up for months.
The images have made it to social media and independent news outlets, highlighting the severity of the impact the Trump administration’s shutoff of oil shipments to the island — and the government’s resistance to any change — on average Cubans.
A man cooks food on a pot on a wood fire during a blackout in the Poey neighborhood of Havana on January 28, 2026. YAMIL LAGE AFP via Getty Images
The prices of food and gas have skyrocketed seemingly overnight: a package of chicken now costs a month’s salary, 5,000 pesos, and a liter of gasoline up to 3,800. Two thirds of the country was without electricity at peak demand last week, and daily electricity cuts averaged more than 20 hours in many provinces.
Cubans were already facing extreme poverty, widespread shortages and daily blackouts when President Donald Trump cut the country’s oil supply from Venezuela and Mexico in a push to open negotiations that could lead to political and economic changes in the communist-run island.
On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged Cuban authorities to make economic reforms as a way out of the impasse. On Sunday, Trump confirmed negotiations were ongoing and again urged Cuban leaders to make a deal.
“Cuba is, right now, a failed nation,” he said. “We’re talking to Cuba right now. I have Marco Rubio talking to Cuba right now, and they should absolutely make a deal because it’s really a humanitarian threat.”
Asked if he would consider a military operation like the one to capture Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro last month, Trump said he didn’t want to answer.
“Why would I answer that?” he added. “If I was, it wouldn’t be a very tough operation, as you can figure, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
But despite the increasing external and internal pressure to reform the island’s hardline Marxist economy, Cuban leaders have vowed to resist and have passed another round of severe austerity measures for the population to endure while denying that the country is about to collapse.
“I believe that the Cuban regime right now is in the classic phase of denial,” said Sebastian Arcos, the interim director of Florida International University’s Cuba Research Institute, in a recent event discussing the situation on the island. “They cannot accept that the strategic situation has changed and that things are different, and they’re not going back to what they used to be. This is the first stage of grief.”
Meanwhile, the situation on the island is deteriorating quickly.
A man rides past an abandoned car in Havana on February 4, 2026. YAMIL LAGE AFP via Getty Images
At the FIU event, Jorge Piñón, who heads the University of Texas’ Latin America and Caribbean Energy Program, said Cuba’s oil reserves might dry up in a matter of weeks.
“Cuba’s electric power sector is totally collapsed,” he said. “If by March you don’t see an oil cargo ship on the horizon coming either into Havana or Cienfuegos, they will have reached ‘zero.’”
Already, cargo transports, trains and buses connecting the provinces, as well as public transportation services in Havana and other cities, have been reduced to a minimum. Private business owners are complaining that they can’t get their imported supplies delivered from ports.
As the country’s crisis worsened in recent years, residents in Havana had to walk and live on streets covered by mounds of garbage because authorities said there was not enough fuel for pickups — but also because the government did not buy enough trash containers, or paid enough to the trash-collection employees, and because most garbage trucks were out of service, Cuba’s own state media reported earlier this month.
Now, the current energy crisis has made the situation so much worse that residents, sickened by the stench and the flies, have started burning the garbage, covering parts of Havana with unhealthy blankets of smoke, Cuban independent news outlet 14ymedio reported.
The fuel shortage has had a devastating impact on tourism too, one of the country’s key sources of revenue. After Cuba reported running out of jet fuel, several international airlines suspended flights to the island. Many workers in the tourism industry have been told not to go to work in hotels in Cuba’s keys, Varadero, Guardalavaca and other tourist destinations, and tourists have been moved to other facilities, as the government and the Cuban military, which owns many of Cuba’s hotels, moved to shut many of them down.
What makes the population so vulnerable at this time is that the country was already at its worst economically since the early days of the revolution, and a humanitarian crisis was unfolding. Cubans were dying because of diseases linked to poor sanitary conditions and lack of medications, were going without electricity most of the day and were struggling to find affordable food. Some experts say it’s the worst crisis since the end of the independence wars from Spain in the 19th century, which left the country in ruins.
The economic crisis, a deep economic contraction that has lasted years, has largely resulted from the failure of the socialist economic model, a hard-currency-hungry military stashing billions of dollars in its accounts, and years of Cuban leaders dragging their feet on urgently needed economic reforms. The COVID-19 pandemic and the tightening of U.S. sanctions under the first Trump administration also played a part.
That Cuban leaders are willing “to drown an entire people in the name of an ideology proves they are fanatics,” said a source in communication with Cuban officials who asked for anonymity to discuss the interactions. “Every day that passes, they sink deeper into a hole,” the person said, noting that the country’s economy is practically paralyzed. “The damage from zero tourism is enormous.”
TOPSHOT – A woman checks her cellphone during a blackout in the Luyanó neighborhood of Havana on January 28, 2026. YAMIL LAGE AFP via Getty Images
Two Miami Herald sources in communication with Cuban officials said they have given little private indication they are willing to negotiate substantial changes on how they run the country, despite public U.S. offers of dialogue. The sources said they were left with the impression that there are no current negotiations between the two governments, in line with what Cuban officials have publicly said.
Their intransigence has proved unpopular. Even voices close to the government are publicly calling for change—if not for a democratic transition.
“Reform and overcome the crisis, or not reform and collapse — that is the Cuban dilemma,” reads the title of a piece penned by Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban diplomat who lives on the island and has for years push for the Cuban government to adopt a Chinese-style, market-oriented economic model. Alzugaray criticized Cuba’s handpicked leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, for not announcing major reforms at a recent press conference in which he instead called for more sacrifice.
“The demand for reforms, primarily economic but also political, is a natural consequence of the times we live in,” Alzugaray wrote in the pro-government blog La Joven Cuba. “This is especially true when we see on the national television news that our leaders, with a few exceptions, continue to repeat past formulas and refuse not only to change, but also to acknowledge the numerous mistakes they have clearly made.”
While Cuban leaders dig in, their choices about what to preserve and what to cut speak to the government’s immediate priorities: securing its survival.
In the much-criticized television appearance, Diaz-Canel said that the defense of the country was paramount and announced military exercises every Saturday. Images shared by the Revolutionary Armed Forces Ministry show troop movements and displays of Soviet-era helicopters, tanks, surface-to-air missile systems and armored vehicles—an expensive and futile show of force, given the overwhelming superiority of the U.S. military.
In the meantime, all scheduled surgeries have been cancelled across the country because, as the minister of health put it, operations “demand electricity.”
“Surgical activity levels usually require more beds for therapy, additional observation beds,” the minister, José Ángel Portal Miranda, said on Cuban television earlier this week, adding that the plan is to reduce the hospitals’ staff and patients’ hospital stays.
He ominously cited the “experience we had with COVID” as a model to follow. At the time, and under his watch, the country’s health system all but collapsed, and the number of deaths from the combined effects of the virus, the suspension of surgeries and the lack of medication is estimated at 55,204, the highest in Latin America.
A man buys charcoal on a road in Havana on February 6, 2026. Across Cuba, families are scrambling to cope with relentless blackouts and shortages worsening under economic pressure from President Donald Trump. ADALBERTO ROQUE AFP via Getty Images
Despite assurances by Portal Miranda that transportation for patients needing dialysis would not be affected, Norge Ernesto Díaz Blak, an activist who delivers aid sent by his social media followers to those in need in Holguín, said several such patients in that province have reached out to him for help after they said authorities told them they would no longer offer transportation to get the treatment.
Hunger is likely to spread, too, as Díaz-Canel warned that the government was preparing for a scenario in which food could not be delivered, and people would have to live on locally produced food.
“Here in Havana, we will eat junk, garbage… we will drink a lot of sewer water and eat a lot of rubble,” replied in a video Lumey Guzmán, a Cuban social-media content creator.
Debate grows in Miami
Cuban Americans in Miami who have been helping their relatives on the island by paying for medicines, food and other necessities to be delivered to them in the country will see their options shrink fast too. Miami-based companies that deliver food in Cuba, such as Cubamax, Supermarket 23 and Katapulk, have suspended home deliveries.
Aware of the acute situation, the State Department recently announced it will send another $6 million in assistance to people in eastern Cuba who were hit hard by Hurricane Melissa last year. Rubio also said Saturday the U.S. was willing to continue expanding the delivery of aid to the Cuban people through the Catholic Church, though “that’s not a long-term solution to the problems on the island,” he added.
But Cuban American representatives in Congress from Miami and local politicians and activists want the Trump administration to take more drastic measures in what they say would amount to a final nudge to speed up the collapse of the Cuban government.
“The communist regime is on its knees. This is not the time to blink,” U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez said in an editorial published on Fox News. “It’s time to finish the job — by enforcing the law, applying maximum pressure and standing proudly on the side of freedom.”
Gimenez asked the Trump administration to halt flights and money remittances to Cuba and recently wrote to Delta Air Lines and American Airlines, urging them to stop flying to the island. Gimenez, along with U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart and María Elvira Salazar, wrote to the departments of the Treasury and Commerce to ask for a review of all licenses to U.S. companies doing business with Cuba.
But Joe Garcia, a Democratic former congressman from Miami, said that stance could backfire as Cuban Americans begin worrying about their relatives on the island. Cuban Americans have left hundreds of comments on social media—and a similar amount of crying emojis— lamenting that U.S.-based online grocery stores have halted food deliveries to the island.
What the Miami members of Congress propose, he added, “would increase the pain suffered by the Cuban people, the suffering of those least able to withstand the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of the Cuban government.”
Cuba’s diplomats have been promoting on social media criticism comparing Trump’s policy towards Cuba to that of Israel in Gaza, in what some Cuba observers see as a strategy to blame the humanitarian crisis entirely on the United States and create a public-opinion crisis that would put pressure on the administration. Progressive International, a far-left organization, is organizing a flotilla with humanitarian aid to Cuba, mimicking tactics employed by activists reacting to the war in Gaza.
The problem is that Trump might not be moved by such a strategy, one of the sources in touch with Cuban officials said, noting the president kept supporting Israel despite accusations it was committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Meanwhile, expectations that change is coming to the island are so high that last week rumors of an impending official announcement from the Cuban government spread like wildfire through social media.
It turned out to be misinformation peddled by various influencers, including some from Miami.
This story was originally published February 17, 2026 at 11:38 AM.
Nora Gámez Torres is the Cuba/U.S.-Latin American policy reporter for el Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald. She studied journalism and media and communications in Havana and London. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from City, University of London. Her work has won awards by the Florida Society of News Editors and the Society for Professional Journalists.//Nora Gámez Torres estudió periodismo y comunicación en La Habana y Londres. Tiene un doctorado en sociología y desde el 2014 cubre temas cubanos para el Nuevo Herald y el Miami Herald. También reporta sobre la política de Estados Unidos hacia América Latina. Su trabajo ha sido reconocido con premios de Florida Society of News Editors y Society for Profesional Journalists.
HAVANA, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Cuba detailed a wide-ranging plan on Friday to protect essential services and ration fuel as the communist-run government dug in its heels in defiance of a U.S. effort to cut off oil supply to the Caribbean island.
The rationing measures are the first to be announced since President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on the U.S.-bound products of any country exporting fuel to Cuba and suggested hard times ahead for Cubans already suffering severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine.
Government ministers said the measures would guarantee fuel supply for key sectors, including agricultural production, education, water supply, healthcare and defense.
Commerce Minister Oscar Perez-Oliva struck a defiant tone as he laid out details of the government plan.
“This is an opportunity and a challenge that we have no doubt we will overcome,” Perez-Oliva told a television news program. “We are not going to collapse.”
The government will supply fuel to the tourism and export sectors, including for the production of Cuba’s world-famous cigars, to ensure the foreign exchange necessary to fund other basic programs, Perez-Oliva said, adding, “If we don’t have income, then we will not overcome this situation.”
Domestic and international air travel will not be immediately affected by the fuel rationing, although drivers will see cutbacks at the pump until supply normalizes, he said.
The government said it would protect ports and ensure fuel for domestic transportation in a bid to protect the island nation’s import and export sectors.
Perez-Oliva also announced an ambitious plan to plant 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of rice to guarantee “an important part of our demand,” but acknowledged fuel shortfalls would push the country to depend more on renewable energy for irrigation needs and animal-power for tilling fields.
Education Minister Naima Ariatne, appearing on the same program, said infant-care centers and primary schools would remain open and in person, but secondary schools and higher education would implement a hybrid system that would require more “flexibility” and vary by institution and region.
“As a priority, we want to leave (open) our primary schools,” Ariatne said.
Top officials said health care would also be prioritized, with special emphasis on emergency services, maternity wards and cancer programs.
(Reporting by Dave Sherwood; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and William Mallard)
MEXICO CITY — President Trump’s plan to slap tariffs on nations that provide oil to Cuba has created a formidable new challenge for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in her efforts to balance Mexico’s interests with White House demands.
On Friday, Sheinbaum said Mexico would seek a clarification from Washington in a bid to avoid a difficult choice: Halt oil shipments to Cuba, potentially triggering a humanitarian crisis on the island, or face new tariffs on Mexican products exported to the United States.
Ceasing oil deliveries to Cuba, she warned, could result in a catastrophic scenario — a cutoff in electrical power to hospitals and homes, threatening medical care, food supplies and other essential services across the island, home to 11 million people.
However, the leftist president signaled that she would not risk the imposition of additional U.S. levies on imports from Mexico, a nation heavily dependent on cross-border trade. “We cannot put our country at risk in terms of tariffs,” Sheinbaum told reporters at her regular morning news conference.
For a year, Sheinbaum has been fending off Washington’s plans to impose punishing new tariffs on Mexico. Her efforts have mostly succeeded — and she has won warm praise from Trump — but a White House decree targeting oil supplies to Cuba presents a difficult new test.
On Thursday, Trump issued an executive order establishing potential tariffs on goods from countries “that sell or otherwise provide oil to Cuba,” a step that, Trump said, was intended to protect “U.S. national security and foreign policy from the Cuban regime’s malign actions and policies.”
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel denounced Trump’s move on social media as a “fascist, criminal and genocidal” plan to “asphyxiate” the Cuban economy, which is already struggling with blackouts and a lack of gasoline, among other shortages.
Sheinbaum has also been engaged in strenuous efforts to dissuade Trump from following through on his threats to deploy U.S. military assets against cartels in Mexico. She has called any prospective U.S. strike on Mexican territory a violation of Mexican sovereignty.
Mexican crude has taken on a new urgency for Cuba since the U.S. ouster this month of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose socialist government was long the major supplier of oil to Cuba. (Havana said 32 Cuban officers, members of Maduro’s security detail, were killed in the operation.)
Maduro’s fall and the Venezuelan government’s subsequent submission to Washington has resulted in a cut-off of Venezuelan oil to Cuba. U.S. imports of Venezuelan oil, meanwhile, have soared.
Mexico supplied Cuba with about 20,000 barrels a day of oil for much of 2025, said Jorge R. Piñon, an energy expert at the University of Texas. But shipments have declined drastically this year, apparently because of U.S. pressure.
“The faucets are being shut off,” said Piñon. “Sheinbaum is walking a tightrope.”
Without imports, he said, Cuba faces a daily oil shortfall of about 60,000 barrels to meet its energy needs. Other potential sources for Cuba include the oil-exporting nations of Russia, Angola, Algeria and Brazil, Piñon said, but it was unclear if any of those countries would be inclined to defy the White House and help bail out Cuba.
Mexico’s support for the Cuban government has long been a point of pride here, a sign of a foreign policy independence from the United States, especially during the Cold War. Mexican leaders, including Sheinbaum, have repeatedly decried Washington’s more than half-century embargo of the island as an illegal blockade that punishes ordinary Cubans, not the country’s communist elite.
It was from the Mexican coast that, in 1956, Fidel Castro sailed to Cuba along with Ernesto “Che” Guevara and other revolutionaries in the yacht Granma, launching an improbable but ultimately successful armed rebellion to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor — labeled Castro a “giant” and called Havana a “progressive” model for resistance to U.S. pressure.
But the U.S. push to block Mexican oil exports to Cuba is also exposing divisions in the ruling Morena political bloc, which was founded by López Obrador.
Leftists in Morena have assailed Washington’s attempt to halt Mexican oil exports to Cuba. But more conservative members of the ruling party have urged caution.
Ricardo Sheffield, a prominent Morena senator who was previously a member of the center-right National Action Party, has called for a review of oil pacts with Cuba. In a recent speech, he acknowledged “the relationship and the history that unites” Mexico and Cuba, but warned: “If we continue giving away oil to Cuba, we will have more problems with our neighbors in the U.S.”
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
A man watches two crude oil tankers remaining anchored on Lake Maracaibo, near Maracaibo, Zulia state, Venezuela on December 17, 2025. US President Donald Trump ordered on December 16, 2025, a “total and complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers Venezuela has been using to bypass a six-year-old US oil embargo. (Photo by Alejandro Paredes / AFP via Getty Images)
ALEJANDRO PAREDES
AFP via Getty Images
Despite the daily hour-long blackouts and gasoline rationing in Cuba, the island’s government sold most the subsidized oil it received from Venezuela last year, a senior U.S. government official told the Miami Herald.
Venezuela provided Cuba with about 70,000 barrels per day of crude oil and refined products worth as much as $1.3 billion from approximately late 2024 through late 2025, the official said, citing information from a previously undisclosed analysis by the U.S. government.
Cuba then sent about 40,000 barrels each day — about 60% — to Asia for resale, the official said.
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum is under increasing pressure over oil shipments to Cuba, which she said involve both paid contracts and humanitarian donations.
The reselling of the oil while the Cuban population endures daily electricity cuts is “further proof that the illegitimate Cuban regime only prioritizes enriching itself all while the Cuban people suffer the consequences of their corrupt nature and incompetence,” a State Department official told the Miami Herald.
“Everyday Cubans deserve the truth as to why the regime hides billions in overseas bank accounts instead of investing in electricity, infrastructure, health, and the daily needs of its people,” the State Department official said.
Previously, a Herald investigation based on leaked secret accounting documents revealed that GAESA, a Cuban military conglomerate, reported about $18 billion in current assets, of which $14.5 billion were deposited in unknown bank accounts as of March 2024.
Experts long suspected that Cuba was reselling some of the oil from Venezuela for hard currency. In December, U.S. forces off the Venezuelan coast seized a shadow fleet tanker, the Skipper, that had transferred a portion of oil cargo to a smaller tanker bound for Cuba and continued its route to Asia, likely to China.
The 70,000 barrels figure is more than double what Reuters and other experts estimated the Venezuelan government was sending to Cuba.
Based on public tanker tracking data, Jorge Piñón, a senior research fellow at the Energy Center at the University of Texas who closely tracks oil shipments to Cuba, estimated that Venezuela exported an average of 30,000 barrels of oil per day to the island during 2025, filling about 50% of Cuba’s oil deficit. Reuters also reported a similar figure, 27,000 barrels per day, based on PDVSA data.
Much of the sanctioned vessels transporting oil from Venezuela to Cuba are part of the so-called “dark fleet” that turn off transponders and spoof location signals to avoid being detected. It is also possible that some of the oil destined to Cuba was not recorded on PDVSA records.
Since the 2000s, Cuba has received subsidized oil from Venezuela thanks to an agreement between Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, and continued under Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan strongman who was captured in a U.S. military raid earlier this month.
In exchange for the oil, Cuba provided Venezuela with doctors. It also helped Chavez and Maduro hold on to power by infiltrating several Cuban advisers into the Venezuelan army and security agencies and providing software and telecommunications services to the Venezuelan police and several other government agencies and companies, including the state oil company PDVSA. Albet, a Cuban company linked to Cuba’s University of Information Sciences, was involved in the creation of the system that issues the IDs Venezuelans need to vote, Venezuelan investigative outlet Armando Info reported at the time.
The Cuban government confirmed that Cuban officers were providing personal security to Maduro on the day the U.S. special operations Delta Forces raided Fort Tiuna in Caracas and apprehended the couple. Thirty-two died, according to Cuban authorities. Cuban state media also reported the return of additional officers who were injured during the raid but did not say how many.
The relationship amounted to colonization, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said soon after the military operation to capture Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.
That alliance seems to have been upended after President Donald Trump said Cuba won’t be receiving more oil from the South American nation. The Trump administration has also pressed the Venezuelan interim government led by Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, to cut ties with U.S. adversaries, including Cuba.
The administration is also looking at how to exert further pressure on Cuba, which is going through its worst economic crisis in many decades, to hasten regime change. Among the options being considered is a complete naval blockade to stop oil shipments to Cuba, Politico reported.
Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel said on X that in a phone call last week with Rodriguez — the first publicly disclosed since Maduro’s ouster — he “expressed our support and solidarity with the homeland of Bolívar and Chávez, its people, and the Bolivarian government; as well as our decision to continue strengthening our historical relations of brotherhood and cooperation.”
He did not mention the oil shipments nor the fate of the thousands of doctors and Cuban “collaborators” in the South American country, two issues likely high on the call’s agenda.
Rodriguez did not provide details of what was discussed other than thanking Díaz-Canel for a call that she said “strengthens our self-esteem as Venezuelans, and it encourages us to continue together in this process, which is unavoidable and inevitable: the unity of our peoples.”
The halt of oil shipments from Venezuela has already caused an islandwide gasoline shortage and daily blackouts that in places like Perico, Matanzas have lasted up to 32 hours, Cubans in a WhatsApp group sharing their hours without electricity said.
Cuba’s electricity company said that nine units inside the island’s power plants are out of service or receiving maintenance and that the country’s distributed generation of power, through small-scale units connected to the grid, was null due to the lack of diesel. Cubans reported widespread blackouts lasting several hours during the weekend, including in Havana. On Monday, over 60% of the island was expected to be in the dark at peak demand at night.
Nora Gámez Torres is the Cuba/U.S.-Latin American policy reporter for el Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald. She studied journalism and media and communications in Havana and London. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from City, University of London. Her work has won awards by the Florida Society of News Editors and the Society for Professional Journalists.//Nora Gámez Torres estudió periodismo y comunicación en La Habana y Londres. Tiene un doctorado en sociología y desde el 2014 cubre temas cubanos para el Nuevo Herald y el Miami Herald. También reporta sobre la política de Estados Unidos hacia América Latina. Su trabajo ha sido reconocido con premios de Florida Society of News Editors y Society for Profesional Journalists.
BOSTON, Jan 25 (Reuters) – A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s push to terminate the legal status of more than 8,400 family members of U.S. citizens and green card holders who moved to the United States from seven Latin American countries.
Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction late on Saturday that prevents the Department of Homeland Security from ending the humanitarian parole granted to thousands of people from Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
They had been allowed to move to the United States under family reunification parole programs that were created or modernized by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration.
Since Republican President Donald Trump succeeded Biden, his administration has ramped up immigration enforcement with $170 billion budgeted for immigration agencies through September 2029, a historic sum.
Under the family reunification programs, U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, also known as green card holders, could apply to serve as sponsors for family members in those seven countries, letting them live in the U.S. while they waited for their immigrant visas to become available.
The Homeland Security Department said on December 12 it was ending the programs on the grounds that they were inconsistent with Trump’s immigration enforcement priorities and were abused to allow “poorly vetted aliens to circumvent the traditional parole process.”
The termination was originally set to take effect January 14, but Talwani issued a temporary restraining order blocking it for 14 days while she considered whether to issue Saturday’s longer-term injunction.
Talwani said the department, led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, had provided no support for its fraud concerns or considered whether individuals could feasibly return to their home countries, where many had sold homes or left jobs.
“The Secretary could not provide a reasoned explanation of the agency’s change in policy without acknowledging these interests,” wrote Talwani, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama. “Accordingly, failure to do so was arbitrary and capricious.”
The department did not respond to a request for comment.
The ruling came in a class action lawsuit pursued by immigrant rights advocates challenging the administration’s broader rollback of temporary parole granted to hundreds of thousands of migrants.
Talwani earlier in that case blocked the administration from ending grants of parole to about 430,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, but the Supreme Court lifted her order, which an appeals court later overturned.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston;Editing by Helen Popper)
A Cuban migrant held in solitary confinement at an immigration detention facility in Texas died after guards held him down and he stopped breathing, according to an autopsy report released Wednesday that ruled the death a homicide.
Geraldo Lunas Campos died Jan. 3 following an altercation with guards. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the 55-year-old father of four was attempting suicide and the staff tried to save him.
But a witness told The Associated Press last week that Lunas Campos was handcuffed as at least five guards held him down and one put an arm around his neck and squeezed until he was unconscious.
His death was one of at least three reported in little more than a month at Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent facility in the desert on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base.
The autopsy report by the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office found Lunas Campos’ body showed signs of a struggle, including abrasions on his chest and knees. He also had hemorrhages on his neck. The deputy medical examiner, Dr. Adam Gonzalez. determined the cause of death was asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.
The report said witnesses saw Lunas Campos “become unresponsive while being physically restrained by law enforcement.” It did not elaborate on what happened during the struggle but cited evidence of injuries to his neck, head and torso associated with physical restraint. The report also noted the presence of petechial hemorrhages — tiny blood spots from burst capillaries that can be associated with intense strain or injury — in the eyelids and skin of the neck.
Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy report for the AP, said the presence of petechiae in the eyes support the conclusion that asphyxia caused the death. Those injuries suggest pressure on the body and are often associated with such deaths, he said.
He said the contusions on Lunas Campos’ body may reflect physical restraint and the neck injuries were consistent with a hand or knee on the neck.
The autopsy also found the presence of prescription antidepressant and antihistamine medications, adding that Lunas Campos had a history of bipolar disorder and anxiety. It made no mention of him attempting suicide.
ICE’s initial account of the death, which included no mention of an altercation with guards, said Lunas Campos had become disruptive and staff moved him into a cellblock where detainees are held away from others.
“While in segregation, staff observed him in distress and contacted on-site medical personnel for assistance,” the agency said in its Jan. 9 statement. “Medical staff responded, initiated lifesaving measures, and requested emergency medical services.”
Lunas Campos was pronounced dead after paramedics arrived.
Last Thursday, after Lunas Campos’ family was first informed the death was likely to be ruled a homicide, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin amended the government’s account, saying he had attempted suicide and guards tried to help him.
“Campos violently resisted the security staff and continued to attempt to take his life,” she said. “During the ensuing struggle, Campos stopped breathing and lost consciousness.”
After the final autopsy report was released Wednesday, McLaughlin issued a statement emphasizing that Lunas Campos was “a criminal illegal alien and convicted child sex predator.”
New York court records show Lunas Campos was convicted in 2003 of sexual contact with a person under 11, a felony for which he was sentenced to one year in jail and placed on the state’s sex offender registry. Lunas Campos was also sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervision in 2009 after being convicted of attempting to sell a controlled substance, according to the New York corrections records. He completed the sentence in January 2017.
“ICE takes seriously the health and safety of all those detained in our custody,” McLaughlin said Wednesday, adding that the agency was investigating the death. DHS has not responded to questions about whether any outside law enforcement agency was also investigating.
It was not immediately clear whether the guards present when Lunas Campos died were government employees or those of a private contractor.
A final determination of homicide by the medical examiner would typically be critical in determining whether any guards are held criminally or civilly liable. The fact that Lunas Campos died on an Army base could limit state and local officials’ legal jurisdiction to investigate.
Lunas Campos was among the first detainees sent to Camp Montana East, arriving in September after ICE arrested him in Rochester, New York, where he lived for more than two decades. He was legally admitted to the U.S. in 1996, part of a wave of Cuban immigrants seeking to reach Florida by boat.
ICE said he was picked up in July as part of a planned immigration enforcement operation due to criminal convictions that made him eligible for removal.
In addition to Lunas Campos, ICE announced that on Dec. 3 an immigrant from Guatemala held in Camp East Montana died after being transferred to a El Paso hospital for care. While the cause of death was still pending, the agency said Francisco Gaspar-Andres, 48, was suspected to have died of liver and kidney failure.
On Sunday, ICE announced that Victor Manuel Diaz, a 36-year-old immigrant from Nicaragua, died at Camp East Montana on Jan. 14 of a “presumed suicide.” The agency said Diaz was detained by ICE earlier this month during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
Unlike with the two prior deaths, Diaz’s body wasn’t sent to the county medical examiner in El Paso.
The government awarded Acquisition Logistics a $1.24 billion contract to build and operate Camp East Montana, which opened in August of last year.
A house in suburban Richmond, Virginia, is listed as the headquarters of Acquisition Logistics and has no public record of running a detention facility before this one.
In an interview with CBS News in September, Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, who had been inside the facility twice at that point, described it as a “giant tent city.”
“There are hard floors. There are walls that go up, probably about three-quarters of the way to the ceiling,” she said at the time.
Escobar said she saw about 1,500 people inside during one visit.
McLaughlin said Wednesday that the autopsy for Diaz is being performed at the Army medical center at Fort Bliss. DHS again did not respond to questions about whether any agency other than ICE will investigate the death.
Escobar on Wednesday called on DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons to brief Congress about the recent deaths.
“DHS must preserve all evidence — including halting their effort to deport the witnesses,” Escobar said Wednesday. “I reiterate my call for Camp East Montana to be shut down and for the contract with the corporation running it to be terminated.”
Cuba’s ruler, Raúl Castro (front left), and the country’s handpicked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel (front right), during a tribute ceremony for 32 Cuban security officers who were protecting Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and were killed in the Jan. 3 U.S. operation to capture him.
Office of the Cuban Presidency.
Following the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in an operation in which several Cuban security officers died protecting him, Donald Trump joined a long line of U.S. presidents who over the decades anticipated the collapse of Cuba’s communist government.
“Cuba gives protection to Venezuela, and Venezuela gives Cuba money through oil — and it’s been that way for a long time — but it doesn’t work that way anymore, so I don’t know what Cuba’s going to do,” Trump told Fox News. “I think Cuba’s going to fail. I don’t think there are alternatives for Cuba.”
Trump warned Cuban leaders to “make a deal before it’s too late.” He then said his administration was already in talks with Cuban authorities, a claim the island’s handpicked president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, promptly denied.
In Miami last week, the head of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Mike Hammer, told reporters not to pay attention to Havana’s denial, but declined to comment on any negotiations. The pressure on the Cuban government “is intensifying,” he said. “What is happening is creating an opportunity, and of course, we want to be able to have the Cuban people benefit from this opportunity.”
Can Trump succeed where others have failed?
The Trump factor
There are several elements that make this moment distinct from other crises the Cuban leadership has weathered over the years.
On the U.S. side, there’s Trump’s unpredictability and his willingness to use military force to achieve foreign policy goals, as the raid to capture Maduro showed.
“I think that’s what the Cubans now learned, that Trump is like no president we’ve had since 1959, so everything they thought they knew is out the window,” said Chris Simmons, a former U.S. counterintelligence official who has helped identify Cuban spies operating in the United States.
“That’s got to make them very nervous,’ added Simmons, who also mentioned the role of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuba hardliner. “When you’ve got Rubio talking about they may be next, they’re going to take that very seriously. I mean, they’d be fools not to.”
Trump said that ousting the regime in Havana might take military action, though he has ruled that out for the moment.
“I don’t think we can have much more pressure other than going in and blasting the hell out of the place,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “I think that Cuba is really in a lot of trouble. But you know, people have been saying that for many years.”
At the same time, Trump’s transactional style and tendency to view international conflicts as opportunities for deal-making might help kickstart a negotiated transition — if Cuban leaders take the off-ramp.
“We are talking to Cuba, and you’ll find out pretty soon,” he said. “One of the groups I want taken care of is the people who came from Cuba who were forced out or left under duress, and they are great citizens of the United States right now.”
Cuba watchers say perhaps Trump is talking about negotiating compensation for Cuban Americans who were forced to flee the island and lost their properties after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. But many other issues could be discussed, including the repatriation of Cubans, allowing private investment and the lifting of some sanctions, said Joe García, a former Democratic member of Congress who has advocated for negotiations with Havana and the release of political prisoners.
After years of dragging its feet on reforms, the Cuban government may not have much time left to act, Hugo Cancio, a Cuban American businessman who owns an online supermarket that delivers food on the island, told the Miami Herald.
“In light of recent developments in Venezuela, Cuba today faces a clearer choice than ever: to open itself in a gradual and credible manner to economic reform, institutional modernization, and broader civic participation, with the constructive engagement of its diaspora, or to continue down a path of managed decline,” Cancio said. “The real risk is not change; the real risk is postponing it until the cost becomes irreversible.”
The Cuba Study Group, an influential Cuban-American organization that has focused on supporting the island’s private sector, also urged the Cuban government to engage in talks with the U.S.
“Today, no external power will bail the island out,” the group said in a statement. “Old formulas will not avert catastrophe. To prevent greater disaster, Cuban authorities must take steps they have never taken before,” including a wide political dialogue that includes the Cuban diaspora.
The group advised Cuban leaders to “propose a bold restructuring that advances the rule of law, democratic norms, and a market economy while preserving a social safety net. And they should make unmistakable gestures—such as unconditionally freeing political prisoners—that demonstrate genuine commitment to turning the page.”
The Rubio factor
In the past, many Cuban exiles and Cuban American hardliners have strongly opposed negotiations with the Cuban government. But this time, they are likely to back up president Trump’s efforts, largely because Rubio, a Cuban American from Miami, is the one steering U.S. policy on Cuba.
“Marco Rubio is the most trustworthy representative the exile community has had in 67 years,” said Marcel Felipe, the chairman of the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora and a Miami Dade College trustee. He said he trusted Rubio to get the best possible outcome in negotiations to push for regime change in Cuba, one that Cuban exiles could live with.
García, the former congressman, said that even though he is a Democrat and Rubio is a Republican, “Marco represents me and many Cubans who want to see change in Cuba.”
State Department officials have been reaching out to members of the Cuban American community for their input about how a transition in Cuba would look like.
“The Cuban exile community has been preparing for this for a long time,” said Felipe, who’s also the chairman of Inspire America, a pro-democracy organization. He said his organization and others have been sharing plans with U.S. officials for “day one” and the country’s reconstruction.
Trump has also commented on the role Cuban Americans will likely play in economically rebuilding Cuba.
“You have a lot of people in this country that want to go back to Cuba and help Cuba,” he said in a meeting last week with the CEOs of several oil companies to discuss investments in Venezuela. “They didn’t have anything, and they became very rich people in our country, and they want to very much go back and help Cuba. That’s something that Cuba has that a lot of other places don’t have.”
The Cuban economy factor
In Cuba, “a Revolution running on empty is finally out of gas,” the Cuba Study Group said.
For decades, Fidel Castro ruled Cubans with a combination of repression, propaganda and populism. Many Cubans still fear opposing the government, but ideological support has eroded, and the state can no longer meet the most basic needs of the population.
The new chapter of confrontation with the United States finds the island at its worst time economically, already on the verge of collapse.
Cuba’s GDP fell another 5% last year, after several years of recession. A botched monetary reform has triggered skyrocketing inflation. The electrical grid collapses regularly, leaving the entire country in the dark. Oil shortages and obsolete power stations constantly breaking down have made daily hours-long blackouts the new normal. Garbage covers streets in the capital, fueling mosquito-borne diseases. Old buildings in Havana frequently collapse after years of neglect.
A sociologist living on the island, Mayra Espina, estimates that more than 40% of the population lives in poverty, a figure that could actually be much higher, over 80%, according to surveys done by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a Spain-based organization.
Unlike the times Fidel Castro maneuvered his way out of crises, Cuba’s current leadership has proved less skillful, more prone to inaction, and notoriously less popular than the late Cuban dictator. A frail Raúl Castro reappeared Thursday to pay homage to the 32 Cuban officers who died during the U.S. raid to capture Maduro. He is the country’s ultimate authority, but he is 94, and behind the scenes power struggles for succession are already likely taking place.
For the time being, Cuban leaders appeared unified and defiant in public. On Friday, Díaz-Canel rejected Trump’s deal offer.
“There is no possibility of surrender or capitulation, nor any kind of understanding based on coercion or intimidation,” he said before shouting Castro’s old slogan, “Patria o Muerte,” Fatherland or Death, during a massive protest rally in Havana organized by the government to show it has broad support.
“Cuba does not have to make any political concessions, and this will never be on the table in negotiations for an understanding between Cuba and the United States,” Díaz-Canel added.
Cuban state media has shown images of military exercises that purport to convey a sense of readiness against a U.S. military attack. The images, however, highlight the vast gulf between the United States’ advanced military armament and Cuba’s old Soviet technology.
Beyond the rhetoric, however, mid-level Cuban officials, economic advisers, academics and others who interact with foreigners share many of the population’s frustration with Díaz-Canel’s leadership and would welcome reforms, Herald sources who travel to Cuba and asked for anonymity to describe their interactions said.
“Ten years ago, you would hear Cuban officials defending Marxism. Now they tell you stuff about Díaz-Canel that makes me look around to see if anyone is listening. They are ready for change,” one of the sources said.
A conspicuous sign of the erosion of support for the Cuban socialist system: Several children and close relatives of former and current Cuban officials, as well as members of the Castro family, live abroad, including Díaz-Canel’s stepson and three grandchildren of Fidel Castro, who live in Spain.
Even Interior Minister Humberto Alfonso Roca Sánchez, who Díaz-Canel said was the one in charge of the Cubans who died protecting Maduro, has two daughters who live in the United States, according to the U.S. government outlet Martí Noticias.
Socialist policies and government repression are behind the largest cumulative exodus in Cuban history. An estimated 2.5 million Cubans left the country between 2021 and 2024, almost a quarter of the island’s population, according to estimates by Juan C. Albizu-Campos, a Cuban economist and demographer, at a conference in Miami of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy in October.
The discontent extends even among Interior Ministry officers who guard Cuban prisons, says José Daniel Ferrer, a former political prisoner and prominent dissident who now lives in exile in Miami. He said some of the guards would mention to him privately they face the same scarcities as the population.
Despite new harsh laws to punish dissent, many Cubans have voiced criticism of the government in public, on social media and in comments left on Cuban state news websites. Asked by a reporter from Cubanet, a Miami-based outlet, what would happen if U.S. forces captured Díaz-Canel, some residents in Havana declined to answer, but others were surprisingly candid.
“How happy that would make me. Get them all the f–k out of here, to see if we can be happy, to see if we can see the fruit of our work,” a man answered.
Obstacles in the way
However different Cuba’s currently economic and political scenario is, any regime change efforts by the Trump administration will face an old dilemma, experts say: Calibrating how much pressure to put on a country that is just 90 miles from the United States and has a sizable amount of its population and their descendants living in South Florida.
Rubio has long been laser-focused on targeting the Cuban military, and the administration is likely to ratchet up pressure on GAESA, the armed forces’ conglomerate that controls at least 40% of the country’s economy. GAESA had been redirecting the country’s foreign revenue into hotels and had $18 billion stashed away last year, while the population faces deprivation, the Herald previously reported.
At the same time, Rubio has spoken carefully, telling the Cuban government it has a choice to make and stressing the administration has no interest in a destabilized Cuba.
“If you put too much pressure on Cuba and really turn the screws on it, you’ve got the makings of a Spanish-speaking Haiti,” said John Kavulich, a longtime Cuba watcher and president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council that tracks trade with Cuba. He believes Rubio will push back against demands by some Cuban American lawmakers to exert maximum economic pressure, “because he’s going to be thinking about the day after, what does this look like?”
The Trump administration has significant leverage, as economists predict the end of Venezuelan oil subsidies could have devastating consequences for the island.
Jorge Piñón, a senior research fellow at the Energy Center at the University of Texas who closely tracks oil shipments to the island, said he did not believe Mexico or Russia will step up to fill the gap left by the halt of Venezuelan oil, which he said covered around 50% of Cuba’s oil import needs.
Still, it is uncertain whether economic pressure alone would make Cuba “fail” on its own, as Trump has predicted.
“It’s not failing on its own; its failure being hastened,” said Kavulich. “But we have seen this movie before. Does this mean that the government of Cuba will collapse? I think not.”
Kavulich believes Cuban leaders will try to make concessions to the Trump administration in order to survive, not unlike what the remaining members of the Maduro regime are currently doing in Venezuela.
“They will start looking in the survival manual and say, okay, what’s the first thing we can do?,” he said. “ We can release political prisoners. What’s the second thing we can do? We can further open up the economy. That’s their playbook. It’s not going to be, ‘we’re going to hold free and fair elections,’ but it’s going to be, ‘what can we do to forestall doing stuff that we really don’t want to do?’”
“The unknown is how much pressure the Trump administration wants to exert,” Kavulich said.
Who is Cuba’s Delcy Rodríguez?
Central to the Trump administration’s efforts to negotiate a future transition with Havana, experts say, is finding Cuba’s equivalent to Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice-president who is now leading an interim government and has so far conceded to key Trump demands.
Power in Cuba is more fragmented than under Fidel Castro’s rule. His brother, Raul, is not in charge of day-to-day decisions. His handpicked successor, Díaz-Canel, is seen as a figurehead atop a civilian government that has little real power, even if he is officially the first secretary of the Communist Party. Few believe he could be the lead negotiator with the Americans.
Real power lies with the military. The generals have seats at the National Assembly, the Party, and the government’s top decision-making bodies. The country’s prime Minister Manuel Marrero, also comes from the military.
Members of the Castro family remain influential. That includes Raúl Castro’s son, Col. Alejandro Castro Espín, who negotiated with U.S. officials during the Obama administration, and grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, who is in charge of Raúl’s personal security and is involved in GAESA’s obscure finances. In less than two years, another family member, Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, a grandnephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro, has been climbing the ladder to become minister of foreign trade and investment and vice prime minister.
Would any of these players be enticed to negotiate to avoid ending like the Venezuelan strongman?
“Part of the message that I think the administration is hoping for is, look what happened to Maduro,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “He was given options to leave peacefully. He wouldn’t have been in an orange jumpsuit now, but he is because he didn’t take the offer to go to Turkey or Qatar. And that’s a lot of leverage. But given the ideological factor in Cuba, I’m a little bit skeptical that they would take the off-ramp. I think many of them would go down with the ship rather than take a negotiated exile”.
Pinpointing precisely who might be Cuba’s reformer who would be willing to work with the United States to dismantle the communist system and rebuild the country has proved elusive.
“I don’t think that there’s really an analogy here with Venezuela,” Berg said. “Whether you agree with this theory or not, we have identified Delcy Rodríguez as the one who could take over and implement pragmatic policies that are pro U.S. What is the analogue in Cuba’s case?”
An unsavory answer
The answer to that question right now might be unsavory for Rubio and Cuban exiles, said Ric Herrero, the executive director of the Cuba Study Group.
“The only person that’s a Delcy-type in Cuba now is Raúl Castro,” he said. “Because what is Delcy? Delcy is someone from within, a senior official. She was a vice president, but who has significant clout within the party, within the bureaucracy and with the military. Someone who can keep all of those sectors in line and all the different factions playing ball.”
“Who can achieve that in Cuba without having the last name Castro?” he asked.
Felipe said it would be “extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Cuban exile community to accept a transition model that involves someone whose last name is Castro.”
Many longtime Cuban activists who have fiercely opposed negotiations with the regime in Havana might end up disappointed if what the administration is doing in Venezuela serves as an example of how it might operate with Cuba. The Helms-Burton Act Congress passed in 1996 forbids recognizing a transitional government led by Raúl Castro but doesn’t say anything about other members of his family.
Cuban opposition members would not favor a negotiation with Raúl Castro or another member of the Castro family, said Ferrer the former political prisoner.
“But if we are pragmatic and one of them negotiates, and Trump and Rubio manage to get the transition to democracy moving as quickly as possible, then that’s better than continuing in the situation we’re in, in complete stagnation, with the people still suffering from hunger, hardship, and extreme poverty, and above all, remaining without rights, without freedom, and constantly repressed, with the prisons full of political prisoners,” Ferrer said.
“Ideally, this process would be completed as soon as possible, and the Castros would disappear from power because of all the harm they have done to Cuba,” he added.
Part of the reason the regime in Havana has been able to survive so long is that, unlike Venezuela, where several opposition parties are still legal, Fidel Castro abolished all opposition parties and dissidents like Ferrer are routinely sent to prison or exile.
Even so, the Trump administration decided to work with Rodriguez instead of María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, to manage a transition, Ferrer noted.
“We are insisting with our American friends that the Cuban opposition, both the internal opposition and the organized exile community that has been fighting for years for a transition to democracy in Cuba, cannot be ignored at any time,” Ferrer said. “We must be an active part of any process. We cannot be marginalized.”
Ultimately, there is one reality that has not changed in several decades in Cuba: the regime in Havana still keeps much of its capacity for repression, has all the guns, and tens of thousands of security and military personnel to squash dissent and instill fear. Protesting often lands people in prison.
On Friday, Cuban independent journalist José Gabriel Barrenechea Chávez was sentenced to six years in prison for participating in a peaceful protest banging pots during a blackout in Villa Clara, a province in central Cuba.
But as the economy collapses and discontent grows among Cubans, increasing U.S. pressure and the regime’s inability to address the population’s pressing needs may well trigger another chapter of mass protests, similar to those in July 2021, Ferrer said.
The regime in Havana, he bet, “won’t make it to the end of the year.”
Nora Gámez Torres is the Cuba/U.S.-Latin American policy reporter for el Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald. She studied journalism and media and communications in Havana and London. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from City, University of London. Her work has won awards by the Florida Society of News Editors and the Society for Professional Journalists.//Nora Gámez Torres estudió periodismo y comunicación en La Habana y Londres. Tiene un doctorado en sociología y desde el 2014 cubre temas cubanos para el Nuevo Herald y el Miami Herald. También reporta sobre la política de Estados Unidos hacia América Latina. Su trabajo ha sido reconocido con premios de Florida Society of News Editors y Society for Profesional Journalists.
HAVANA, Jan 16 (Reuters) – Thousands of Cubans gathered before the U.S. embassy in Havana at daybreak Friday to protest against what they denounced as U.S. aggression in the region following the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicola Maduro, a Cuban ally.
Tension between the two longtime rivals has spiked since the U.S. attack on Venezuela, which resulted in the deaths of 32 Cuban military and intelligence officers believed to be defending Maduro were killed, marking the first clashes between U.S. and Cuban forces in decades.
Cubans bundled in hats and jackets gathered on the capital`s Malecon waterfront boulevard waving Cuban and Venezuelan flags under gray skies as blustery winds and waves buffeted the coast.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, dressed in olive-green military garb and with his back to the U.S. embassy, called on Cubans to remain united in the face of U.S. pressure.
“No, imperialists, we have absolutely no fear of you…and we don`t like to be threatened,” he said, turning to wave his finger at the embassy building. “You will not intimidate us.”
Both sides have ratcheted up political rhetoric in recent days, marking a new low in long frosty relations between the U.S. and communist-run Cuba, which lies 90 miles (145 km)from the shores of Florida.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday that no more Venezuelan oil or money would go to Cuba, warning Havana to make a deal before it’s “too late.”
Diaz-Canel said after Trump’s comments that Cuba would defend its homeland “to the last drop of blood.”
(Reporting by Dave Sherwood, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
President Trump is commenting on the safety of U.S. companies that may work in Venezuela to extract oil. This comes as Mr. Trump remarks on Cuba’s access to Venezuelan oil. Rebecca Patterson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins with more.
Donald Trump is once again serving up a quote that sounds less like a presidential soundbite and more like a rejected line from a supervillain origin movie. And yes, it’s as alarming as it is headline-ready.
In a new interview with the New York Times that has everyone clutching their pearls, Trump made it clear that pesky little things like international laws, rules, and norms are more of a suggestion than an actual obstacle. When discussing his ever-expanding vision for American dominance on Thursday, he casually dropped this gem:
“I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Oh, okay! If you say so! Nothing says reassuring like dismissing international law in the same breath as claiming you’ll only have benevolent intentions… Yeah, tell that to the multiple civilians who’ve been killed of late..
When the Times tried to gently nudge him back toward reality by pointing out that, yes, laws do apply, Trump doubled down with a rhetorical shrug that could be heard around the globe:
“It depends what your definition of international law is.”
WHAT?!
Because definitions are so subjective, right? Gravity, laws, facts: all vibes-based, apparently. Sheesh…
But wait, it gets better. According to Trump, there is exactly one thing holding him back from full-on global supremacy. And no, it’s not Congress, the courts, or literally the rest of the world. It’s this:
“My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Take a moment, y’all. Breathe. Scream into a pillow if needed.
This interview lands just days after US forces under Trump’s direction seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and first lady Cilia Flores during strikes on the city of Caracas before shipping them off to face narco terrorism charges. Venezuela may have an interim leader now, but Trump has been boasting America is basically running the show.
And why stop there? Greenland is still on his wishlist, too. To that end, Trump explained to the Times on Thursday that being allies with Denmark simply isn’t enough. He wants full ownership of the land mass. In his own words:
“Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
Add this to past musings about Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Mexico, and suddenly this feels less like foreign policy and more like a Monopoly board where someone flipped the table.
Buckle up, y’all. Apparently the only thing between us and Trump’s global takeover is… Trump. Yikes.
Cuban officials on Monday lowered flags before dawn to mourn 32 security officers they say were killed in the U.S. weekend strike in Venezuela, the island nation’s closest ally, as residents here wonder what the capture of President Nicolás Maduro means for their future.The two governments are so close that Cuban soldiers and security agents were often the Venezuelan president’s bodyguards, and Venezuela’s petroleum has kept the economically ailing island limping along for years. Cuban authorities over the weekend said the 32 had been killed in the surprise attack “after fierce resistance in direct combat against the attackers, or as a result of the bombing of the facilities.”Related video above: What happens next: Venezuela’s future after U.S. capture of MaduroThe Trump administration has warned outright that toppling Maduro will help advance another decades-long goal: Dealing a blow to the Cuban government. Severing Cuba from Venezuela could have disastrous consequences for its leaders, who on Saturday called for the international community to stand up to “state terrorism.”On Saturday, Trump said the ailing Cuban economy will be further battered by Maduro’s ouster.“It’s going down,” Trump said of Cuba. “It’s going down for the count.” Loss of key supporterMany observers say Cuba, an island of about 10 million people, exerted a remarkable degree of influence over Venezuela, an oil-rich nation with three times as many people. At the same time, Cubans have long been tormented by constant blackouts and shortages of basic foods. And after the attack, they woke to the once-unimaginable possibility of an even grimmer future.“I can’t talk. I have no words,” 75-year-old Berta Luz Sierra Molina said as she sobbed and placed a hand over her face.Even though 63-year-old Regina Méndez is too old to join the Cuban military, she said that “we have to stand strong.”“Give me a rifle, and I’ll go fight,” Méndez said.Maduro’s government was shipping an average of 35,000 barrels of oil daily over the last three months, about a quarter of total demand, said Jorge Piñón, a Cuban energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute.“The question to which we don’t have an answer, which is critical: Is the U.S. going to allow Venezuela to continue supplying Cuba with oil?” he said.Piñón noted that Mexico once supplied Cuba with 22,000 barrels of oil a day before it dropped to 7,000 barrels after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Mexico City in early September.“I don’t see Mexico jumping in right now,” Piñón said. “The U.S. government would go bonkers.”Ricardo Torres, a Cuban economist at American University in Washington, said that “blackouts have been significant, and that is with Venezuela still sending some oil.”“Imagine a future now in the short term losing that,” he said. “It’s a catastrophe.”Piñón noted that Cuba doesn’t have the money to buy oil on the international market.“The only ally that they have left out there with oil is Russia,” he said, noting that it sends Cuba about 2 million barrels a year.“Russia has the capability to fill the gap. Do they have the political commitment, or the political desire to do so? I don’t know,” he said.Torres also questioned whether Russia would extend a hand.“Meddling with Cuba could jeopardize your negotiation with the U.S. around Ukraine. Why would you do it? Ukraine is far more important,” he said.Torres said Cuba should open its doors to the private sector and market and reduce its public sector, moves that could help prompt China to step in and help Cuba.“Do they have an alternative? I don’t think they do,” he said.Rebuilding Venezuela’s oil industryOn Monday, Trump told NBC News in an interview that the U.S. government could reimburse oil companies making investments in Venezuela to maintain and increase oil production in that country.He suggested that the necessary rebuilding of the country’s neglected infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil could happen in less than 18 months.“I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money,” Trump said. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.”It still remains unclear how quickly the investment could occur given the uncertainties about Venezuela’s political stability and the billions of dollars needed to be spent.Venezuela produces on average about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, down from the 3.5 million barrels a day produced in 1999 before a government takeover of the majority of oil interests and a mix of corruption, mismanagement and U.S. economic sanctions led output to fall.___Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Associated Press reporters Milexsy Durán in Havana, Isabel DeBre in Buenos Aires and Joshua Boak in Washington, D.C., contributed.
Cuban officials on Monday lowered flags before dawn to mourn 32 security officers they say were killed in the U.S. weekend strike in Venezuela, the island nation’s closest ally, as residents here wonder what the capture of President Nicolás Maduro means for their future.
The two governments are so close that Cuban soldiers and security agents were often the Venezuelan president’s bodyguards, and Venezuela’s petroleum has kept the economically ailing island limping along for years. Cuban authorities over the weekend said the 32 had been killed in the surprise attack “after fierce resistance in direct combat against the attackers, or as a result of the bombing of the facilities.”
Related video above: What happens next: Venezuela’s future after U.S. capture of Maduro
The Trump administration has warned outright that toppling Maduro will help advance another decades-long goal: Dealing a blow to the Cuban government. Severing Cuba from Venezuela could have disastrous consequences for its leaders, who on Saturday called for the international community to stand up to “state terrorism.”
On Saturday, Trump said the ailing Cuban economy will be further battered by Maduro’s ouster.
“It’s going down,” Trump said of Cuba. “It’s going down for the count.”
Loss of key supporter
Many observers say Cuba, an island of about 10 million people, exerted a remarkable degree of influence over Venezuela, an oil-rich nation with three times as many people. At the same time, Cubans have long been tormented by constant blackouts and shortages of basic foods. And after the attack, they woke to the once-unimaginable possibility of an even grimmer future.
“I can’t talk. I have no words,” 75-year-old Berta Luz Sierra Molina said as she sobbed and placed a hand over her face.
Even though 63-year-old Regina Méndez is too old to join the Cuban military, she said that “we have to stand strong.”
“Give me a rifle, and I’ll go fight,” Méndez said.
Maduro’s government was shipping an average of 35,000 barrels of oil daily over the last three months, about a quarter of total demand, said Jorge Piñón, a Cuban energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute.
“The question to which we don’t have an answer, which is critical: Is the U.S. going to allow Venezuela to continue supplying Cuba with oil?” he said.
Piñón noted that Mexico once supplied Cuba with 22,000 barrels of oil a day before it dropped to 7,000 barrels after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Mexico City in early September.
“I don’t see Mexico jumping in right now,” Piñón said. “The U.S. government would go bonkers.”
Ricardo Torres, a Cuban economist at American University in Washington, said that “blackouts have been significant, and that is with Venezuela still sending some oil.”
“Imagine a future now in the short term losing that,” he said. “It’s a catastrophe.”
Piñón noted that Cuba doesn’t have the money to buy oil on the international market.
“The only ally that they have left out there with oil is Russia,” he said, noting that it sends Cuba about 2 million barrels a year.
“Russia has the capability to fill the gap. Do they have the political commitment, or the political desire to do so? I don’t know,” he said.
Torres also questioned whether Russia would extend a hand.
“Meddling with Cuba could jeopardize your negotiation with the U.S. around Ukraine. Why would you do it? Ukraine is far more important,” he said.
Torres said Cuba should open its doors to the private sector and market and reduce its public sector, moves that could help prompt China to step in and help Cuba.
“Do they have an alternative? I don’t think they do,” he said.
Rebuilding Venezuela’s oil industry
On Monday, Trump told NBC News in an interview that the U.S. government could reimburse oil companies making investments in Venezuela to maintain and increase oil production in that country.
He suggested that the necessary rebuilding of the country’s neglected infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil could happen in less than 18 months.
“I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money,” Trump said. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.”
It still remains unclear how quickly the investment could occur given the uncertainties about Venezuela’s political stability and the billions of dollars needed to be spent.
Venezuela produces on average about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, down from the 3.5 million barrels a day produced in 1999 before a government takeover of the majority of oil interests and a mix of corruption, mismanagement and U.S. economic sanctions led output to fall.
___
Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Associated Press reporters Milexsy Durán in Havana, Isabel DeBre in Buenos Aires and Joshua Boak in Washington, D.C., contributed.
President Donald Trump late Sunday predicted Cuba was “ready to fall” after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, warning that Havana can no longer rely on Caracas for security and oil.
Trump said Cuba’s fate is now directly tied to Maduro’s ouster and the collapse of Venezuela’s ability to bankroll allies in the region.
Asked if he was considering U.S. action in Cuba, Trump replied: “I think it’s just going to fall. I don’t think we need any action. Looks like it’s going down. It’s going down for the count.”
The president’s comments during a press gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One come after Saturday’s capture of Maduro and his wife on charges tied to a narco-terrorism conspiracy. The audacious operation has sent shockwaves through allied governments in the region, with Cuban officials calling for rallies in support of Venezuela and accusing the U.S. of violating sovereignty.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters while in flight on Air Force One, Sunday, Jan. 4, 2026, as returning to Joint Base Andrews, Md.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
U.S. officials say Cuban security forces played a central role in keeping Maduro in power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Cuban operatives effectively ran Venezuela’s internal intelligence and security operations – including personally guarding Maduro and monitoring loyalty inside his government.
Protestors rally outside the White House, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, in Washington, after the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a military operation.(Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo)
“It was Cubans that guarded Maduro,” Rubio said. “He was not guarded by Venezuelan bodyguards. He had Cuban bodyguards.”
Cuba’s government acknowledged Sunday that 32 Cuban military and police officers were killed during the American operation in Venezuela, marking the first official death toll released by Havana. Cuban state media said the officers had been deployed at the request of Caracas and announced two days of national mourning.
Trump confirmed Cuban casualties while traveling back to Washington.
“A lot of Cubans were killed yesterday,” he said. “There was a lot of death on the other side. No death on our side.”
Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores face ‘worst case scenario’ in U.S. custody, according to expert, with federal indictments on drug and weapons charges.( Juan BARRETO / AFP via Getty Images)
Trump also took aim at neighboring Colombia, accusing its leadership of fueling drug trafficking into the U.S.
“Colombia is very sick, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” Trump said, adding that the country, “is not going to be doing it for a very long time.”
President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro speaks during a military ceremony commemorating the 200th anniversary of the presentation of the ‘Sword of Peru’ to Venezuelan independence hero Simón Bolívar on November 25, 2025, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Jesus Vargas/Getty Images)
He suggested the U.S. was prepared to act against narco-trafficking networks operating by land and sea, citing recent interdictions.
Trump also revived his long-standing focus on Greenland, arguing the Arctic territory is critical to U.S. security amid growing Russian and Chinese activity.
“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,” Trump said. “Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”
Trump has framed Saturday’s operation as part of a broader effort to reassert U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere, invoking the Monroe Doctrine and warning that hostile regimes can no longer rely on one another for survival.
Maduro is set to be arraigned in federal court in New York on Monday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bradford Betz is a Fox News Digital breaking reporter covering crime, political issues, and much more.
HAVANA, Jan 4 (Reuters) – The Cuban government said on Sunday that 32 of its citizens were killed during the U.S. raid on Venezuela to extract President Nicolas Maduro for prosecution in the United States.
Havana said there would be two days of mourning on January 5 and 6 in honor of those killed and said funeral arrangements would be announced.
The Cuban government statement gave few details, but said all the dead were members of the Cuban armed forces and intelligence agencies.
“True to their responsibilities concerning security and defense, our compatriots fulfilled their duty with dignity and heroism and fell, after fierce resistance, in direct combat against the attackers or as a result of bombings on the facilities,” the statement said.
Cuba has provided some security for Maduro since he came to power. It was not clear how many Cubans were guarding the Venezuelan president when they died and how many may have perished elsewhere.
Maduro, 63, and his wife Cilia Flores were seized by U.S. forces in the Venezuela capital Caracas on Saturday and flown to the United States. Maduro is being held in a New York detention center awaiting a Monday court appearance on drug charges.
Maduro was indicted in 2020 on U.S. charges including narco-terrorism conspiracy. He has always denied any criminal involvement.
(Reporting by Marc Frank; Editing by Tom Hogue and Michael Perry)
