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.
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.
Sun shines through Douglas fir trees in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman, File)
WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service on Tuesday finalized revisions to its rules governing oil and gas development on National Forest System lands, a move the Trump administration says will speed permitting and boost domestic energy production but that has drawn concern from officials in the Pacific Northwest over potential environmental harm.
The updated regulation, published in the Federal Register, streamlines how federal agencies manage oil and gas leasing across millions of acres of public land. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the changes align with President Donald Trump’s executive orders declaring a national energy emergency and calling for expanded U.S. energy production.
“President Trump has made it clear that unleashing American energy requires a government that works at the speed of the American people, not one slowed by bureaucratic red tape,” Rollins said in a statement. She said the revisions would give energy producers more certainty while “safeguarding forests and communities.”
Burgum said the rule replaces what he described as delays under the previous administration with a more efficient system that will “boost production, slash energy costs, and guarantee our global leadership.”
The final rule, known as 36 CFR 228 Subpart E, updates federal oil and gas leasing procedures to allow the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to coordinate more closely when issuing permits. It establishes a single leasing decision point and reduces duplicative environmental reviews, steps the agencies say will reduce backlogs and speed decisions on applications to drill.
Under federal law, the Forest Service manages the surface of national forest lands, while the BLM oversees subsurface mineral rights. The agencies jointly develop permitting conditions under their separate authorities.
According to federal data, 5,154 oil and gas leases currently cover about 3.8 million acres — roughly 2% — of National Forest System lands. About 2,850 of those leases, spanning 1.8 million acres across 39 national forests and grasslands, have producing oil or gas wells.
Officials in Oregon and Washington, however, have expressed concern that faster leasing and permitting could threaten the region’s natural beauty and sensitive ecosystems, arguing that federal policies should prioritize environmental protection and recreation alongside energy development in the Pacific Northwest’s forests and public lands.
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.
Since the U.S. ousted Maduro, the former vice president has been working to meet the Trump administration’s demands — while at times publicly denouncing what the U.S. has done — and all the while working to consolidate her control over the regime and country. Per Bloomberg:
[Rodríguez] has seamlessly moved into the role of acting president. She has chaired meetings with senior officials, greeted international envoys, welcomed the press at Miraflores Palace and met privately with diplomats. But beneath the continuity, the bedrock of Chavismo — Venezuela’s brand of socialism — is beginning to shift as Rodríguez quickly moves to consolidate authority and unite the fractured ruling coalition. There are some subtle changes. Rodríguez’s days start earlier, her public remarks are far more concise and the marathon speeches that defined Maduro’s rule are gone. Public officials are now allowed back on X.
Other moves are far more consequential, including a reshaping of the cabinet and security apparatus and the release of dozens of political prisoners. Decisions on senior personnel are being received positively by the Trump administration, according to one person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing sensitive deliberations.
Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have repeatedly said that Rodríguez has been doing what the administration tells her. Trump has called her a “terrific person” and last week told Reuters that she “has been very good to deal with.” He also said that he thinks she’s “eventually” going to come to the White House, and that “I’ll go to their country too.”
The regime has also moved to reopen the U.S. embassy in Caracas and has already hosted a U.S. delegation. At the same time, Rodríguez and other regime officials have been trying to have it all ways, signaling willing partnership and shared opportunity with Trump and the U.S., while also insisting they are just as anti-imperialist as they ever were.
On Thursday, Rodríguez met in Caracas with CIA director John Ratcliffe, the most senior Trump administration official to visit the country since the invasion. His high-profile visit was reportedly intended to further signal the administration’s support for Rodríguez as the country’s interim leader. (Ahead of the Maduro operation, a CIA assessment indicated that Rodríguez would be the best choice to take over and maintain stability in the country.)
Here’s what Freddy Guevara, the former vice president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, who has been living in exile for the past four years, recently told Reveal about Rodríguez and her grip on power:
I know her and I know her brother. I was involved, as I said, in negotiation processes and they were both in there. And I have to tell you that they are not moderate at all, they are super radical, and they believe they are smarter than everyone. I am sure that what they’re trying to do is to convince Trump or the Trump administration to allow them to have kind of a Saudi Arabia or China in Latin America. Which means international investments, but no political freedom for example. I think that’s her plan A.
I think their plan B is to outsmart Trump and figure it out, how to survive and buy time, make small concessions enough to not get them out of power.
In the aftermath of the U.S. military strike that seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, the Trump administration has emphasized its desire for unfettered access to Venezuela’s oil more than conventional foreign policy objectives, such as combating drug trafficking or bolstering democracy and regional stability.
During his first news conference after the operation, President Trump claimed oil companies would play an important role and that the oil revenue would help fund any further intervention in Venezuela.
Soon after, “Fox & Friends” hosts asked Trump about this prediction.
As a historian of U.S.-Latin American relations, I’m not surprised that oil or any other commodity is playing a role in U.S. policy toward the region. What has taken me aback, though, is the Trump administration’s openness about how much oil is driving its policies toward Venezuela.
As I’ve detailed recently, U.S. military intervention in Latin America has largely been covert. And when the U.S. orchestrated the coup that ousted Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, the U.S. covered up the role that economic considerations played in that operation.
By the early 1950s, Guatemala had become a top source for the bananas Americans consumed, as it remains today.
The United Fruit Company, based in Boston, owned more than 550,000 acres of Guatemalan land, largely thanks to its deals with previous dictatorships. These holdings required the intense labor of impoverished farmworkers who were often forced from their traditional lands. Their pay was rarely stable, and they faced periodic layoffs and wage cuts.
The company’s seemingly unlimited clout in the countries where it operated gave rise to the stereotype of Central American nations as “banana republics.”
In Guatemala, a country historically marked by extreme inequality, a broad coalition formed in 1944 to overthrow its repressive dictatorship in a popular uprising. Inspired by the anti-fascistideals of World War II, the coalition sought to make the nation more democratic and its economy more fair.
After decades of repression, the nation democratically elected Juan José Arévalo and then Jacobo Árbenz, under whom, in 1952, Guatemala implemented a land reform program that gave landless farmworkers their own undeveloped plots. Guatemala’s government asserted that these policies would build a more equitable society for Guatemala’s impoverished, Indigenous majority.
United Fruit sought to enlist the U.S. government in its fight against the elected government’s policies. While its executives did complain that Guatemala’s reforms hurt its financial investments and labor costs, they also cast any interference in its operations as part of a broader communist plot.
United Fruit executives began to meet with officials in the Truman administration as early as 1945. Despite the support of sympathetic ambassadors, the U.S. government apparently wouldn’t intervene directly in Guatemala’s affairs.
The company turned to Congress.
It hired well connected lobbyists to portray Guatemala’s policies as part of a communist plot to destroy capitalism and the United States. In February 1949, multiple members of Congress denounced Guatemala’s labor reforms as communist.
Sen. Claude Pepper called the labor code “obviously intentionally discriminatory against this American company” and “a machine gun aimed at the head of this American company.”
Seventy-seven years later, we may see many echoes of past interventions, but now the U.S. government has dropped the veil: In his appearance after the strike that seized Maduro this month, Trump said “oil” 21 times.
Aaron Coy Moulton is an associate professor of Latin American history at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas and the author of “Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom.” This article was produced in collaboration with the Conversation.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he is “inclined” to keep ExxonMobil out of Venezuela after its top executive was skeptical about oil investment efforts in the country after the toppling of former President Nicolás Maduro.“I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One as he departed West Palm Beach, Florida. “They’re playing too cute.”Video above: President Trump asks oil giants for $100B to restart Venezuela’s oil industryDuring a meeting Friday with oil executives, Trump tried to assuage the concerns of the companies and said they would be dealing directly with the U.S., rather than the Venezuelan government.Some, however, weren’t convinced.“If we look at the commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela, today it’s uninvestable,” said Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. oil company.An ExxonMobil spokesperson did not immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment.Also on Friday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to ensure that Venezuelan oil revenue remains protected from being used in judicial proceedings.The executive order, made public on Saturday, says that if the funds were to be seized for such use, it could “undermine critical U.S. efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela.” Venezuela has a history of state asset seizures, ongoing U.S. sanctions and decades of political uncertainty.Getting U.S. oil companies to invest in Venezuela and help rebuild the country’s infrastructure is a top priority of the Trump administration after Maduro’s capture.The White House is framing the effort to “run” Venezuela in economic terms, and Trump has seized tankers carrying Venezuelan oil, has said the U.S. is taking over the sales of 30 million to 50 million barrels of previously sanctioned Venezuelan crude, and plans to control sales worldwide indefinitely.Seung Min Kim reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE —
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he is “inclined” to keep ExxonMobil out of Venezuela after its top executive was skeptical about oil investment efforts in the country after the toppling of former President Nicolás Maduro.
“I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One as he departed West Palm Beach, Florida. “They’re playing too cute.”
Video above: President Trump asks oil giants for $100B to restart Venezuela’s oil industry
During a meeting Friday with oil executives, Trump tried to assuage the concerns of the companies and said they would be dealing directly with the U.S., rather than the Venezuelan government.
Some, however, weren’t convinced.
“If we look at the commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela, today it’s uninvestable,” said Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. oil company.
An ExxonMobil spokesperson did not immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment.
Also on Friday, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to ensure that Venezuelan oil revenue remains protected from being used in judicial proceedings.
The executive order, made public on Saturday, says that if the funds were to be seized for such use, it could “undermine critical U.S. efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela.” Venezuela has a history of state asset seizures, ongoing U.S. sanctions and decades of political uncertainty.
Getting U.S. oil companies to invest in Venezuela and help rebuild the country’s infrastructure is a top priority of the Trump administration after Maduro’s capture.
The White House is framing the effort to “run” Venezuela in economic terms, and Trump has seized tankers carrying Venezuelan oil, has said the U.S. is taking over the sales of 30 million to 50 million barrels of previously sanctioned Venezuelan crude, and plans to control sales worldwide indefinitely.
Seung Min Kim reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.
President Trump on Wednesday withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations and treaties, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In a presidential memorandum, Trump said it is “contrary to the interests of the United States to remain a member of, participate in, or otherwise provide support to” the organizations, which also include groups geared toward education, economic development, cybersecurity and human rights issues, among others. He directed all executive departments and agencies to take steps to “effectuate the withdrawal” of the U.S. from the organizations as soon as possible.
While the president has already announced a withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement — an international treaty to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius in order to prevent the worst effects of climate change — the latest move will further isolate the nation at a critical moment, experts said.
The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change is a global treaty created in 1992 and signed by nearly 200 countries with the aim of addressing climate change through coordinated international action, including limiting planet-warming greenhouse gases. Trump already raised eyebrows last year by refusing to attend or send any high-level delegates to the annual U.N. Conferences of the Parties meeting in Brazil, where Gov. Gavin Newsom instead took on a starring role.
Withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention is a “shortsighted, embarrassing, and foolish decision,” Gina McCarthy, a former director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement.
“As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of U.S. climate change leadership and global collaboration,” said McCarthy, who also served as the first White House national climate advisor and is now chair of the America is All In climate coalition.
David Widawsky, director of the World Resources Institute, called the move a “strategic blunder that gives away American advantage for nothing in return.”
“The 30-year-old agreement is the foundation of international climate cooperation. Walking away doesn’t just put America on the sidelines — it takes the U.S. out of the arena entirely,” Widawsky said.
Trump on Wednesday also withdrew the U.S. from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading global scientific body studying global warming. Its major assessments published every six or seven years help inform climate policy around the world.
Pulling the U.S. out of the IPCC won’t prevent individual U.S. scientists from contributing, but the nation as a whole will no longer be able to help guide the scientific assessments, said Delta Merner, associate accountability campaign director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has attended previous IPCC meetings.
“Walking away doesn’t make the science disappear, it only leaves people across the United States, policymakers and businesses flying in the dark at the very moment when credible climate information is most urgently needed,” Merner said. “This is a clear attempt to weaken scientific guardrails that protect the public from disinformation, delay and reckless decision-making. Such a move will make it easier for fossil fuel interests to distort the facts while front-line communities pay the price.”
Trump, who received substantial donations from oil and gas companies during his 2024 presidential campaign, has heavily promoted the development of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. He has also taken several steps to limit scientific research and climate action in the U.S., including moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the world’s leading climate and weather research institutions, in Boulder, Colo.
Last year, the Trump administration also fired hundreds of scientists working to prepare the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment and removed the website that housed previous assessments.
Other climate, environment and energy groups Trump withdrew from on Wednesday include the International Renewable Energy Agency, the International Solar Alliance, the the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, among many others.
But the United States is the first nation to walk away from the U.N. Framework Convention, according to Manish Bapna, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.
“President Trump pulls the United States out of the UNFCCC at the nation’s peril,” Bapna said. “It is not only self-defeating to let other countries write the global rules of the road for the inevitable transition to clean energy, but also to skip out on trillions of dollars in investment, jobs, lower energy costs and new markets for American clean technologies.”
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 said a U.S. military assault succeeded in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, both facing U.S. charges related to cocaine trafficking under newly unsealedindictments.
In a Jan. 3 press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said the U.S. would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
Trump also said Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president. Trump said Rodríguez had talked to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
However, Rodríguez criticized the U.S. military action as “brutal aggression” on state television and called for Maduro’s immediate release.
Maduro, an authoritarian, has led Venezuela since 2013, succeeding an ideological ally, Hugo Chávez, who had been in office since 1999. Under both men, U.S. relations with Venezuela frayed over foreign policy, oil and human rights.
In July 2024, Maduro declared victory following an election that international observers described as fraudulent. The country’s opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, received about 70% of the vote.
Tensions between Trump and Maduro escalated in September after the U.S. government began attacking vessels off the coast of Venezuela, killing more than 100 people, in what Trump described as an effort to thwart drug smuggling.
When a reporter asked Trump during the Mar-a-Lago press event whether he’d spoken to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado following Maduro’s arrest, Trump said Machado “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country.”
Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for democracy in Venezuela, had a 72% approval rating from Venezuelans according to a March poll by ClearPath Strategies.
Trump said without evidence that the United States’ role in governing Venezuela “won’t cost us anything” because U.S. oil companies would invest in new infrastructure in the oil-rich country. “It’s going to make a lot of money,” Trump said.
Here, we fact-checked Trump’s and Rubio’s statements from the press conference.
Rubio: “It’s just not the kind of mission that you can prenotify (Congress about) because it endangers the mission.”
The administration’s lack of warning to Congress bucks laws and precedents.
Rubio said members of Congress were not notified in advance. Trump said the administration was concerned about Congress potentially leaking news of the administration’s decision to capture Maduro.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., praised the operation as a “decisive action.”
But Congressional Democrats said Congress should have been notified in advance. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said, “Maduro is terrible. But Trump put American servicemembers at risk with this unauthorized attack.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said Trump and his cabinet were not forthcoming about their intentions for regime change, so “we are left with no understanding of how the administration is preparing to mitigate risks to the U.S. and we have no information regarding a long-term strategy following today’s extraordinary escalation.”
The U.S. Constitution assigns Congress the right to declare war. The last time that happened was for World War II.
Since then, presidents have generally initiated military action using their constitutionally granted powers as commander in chief without an official declaration of war.
Since Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president has had to report to Congress within 48 hours of introducing the U.S. military into hostilities and terminate the use of the military within 60 days unless Congress approves. If approval is not granted and the president deems it an emergency, an additional 30 days are granted for ending operations.
In recent decades, congressional consent has usually been granted through an authorization for the use of military force. But an authorization has not been passed for operations in Venezuela. Kaine and other lawmakers have pursued legislation — so far fruitlessly — to prohibit the use of federal funds for any use of military force in or against Venezuela without Congressional authorization.
The Trump administration has whittled away at prior notification requirements. Under federal law, eight bipartisan, senior members of Congress must receive prior notice of particularly sensitive covert actions. In June 2025, the administration told Republicans, but not Democrats, about the forthcoming U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. For the Venezuela operation, it appears no lawmakers were notified in advance.
Trump: Each U.S. boat strike off the coast of Venezuela saves 25,000 people.
The Trump administration has struck at least 32 vessels killing about 115 people in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September. Trump said previously that the boats were carrying drugs en route to the U.S. and during the press conference he said the drugs on each boat would kill “on average, 25,000 people.”
However, experts on drugs and Venezuela told PolitiFact the country plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the U.S. And the administration has provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it says were on the boats. This lack of information makes it impossible to know how many lethal doses of the drugs could have been destroyed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 73,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. That means the drugs on 32 boats would have been responsible for 800,000 deaths, nearly 11 times the number of U.S. overdose deaths in one year.
Trump: “Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide.”
There is no evidence Maduro sent members of Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua to the U.S.
The U.S. Justice Department indictment against Maduro does not mention Trump’s statement.
An April report from the federal National Intelligence Council contradicted Trump’s statements about links between Maduro and Tren de Aragua.
“While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables (Tren de Aragua) to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” the report said.
In the early 20th century, Venezuela’s long-serving dictator, Juan Vicente Gómez, allowed foreign companies almost exclusive access to the country’s oil resources.
In 1975, after decades of seeking greater control of its oil resources, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry.
“Trump’s claim that Venezuela has stolen oil and land from the U.S. is baseless,” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver, told The Washington Post. “The U.S. was much more interested in having Venezuela be a provider of oil — relatively cheap oil — than to have a production collapse in Venezuela,” Rodríguez said. As a result, the change was “relatively uncontroversial” at the time.
U.S. oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil and Gulf, now Chevron, lost about $5 billion each in assets and were compensated $1 billion each, according to news reports, the Post reported.
But Rodríguez said the companies didn’t push for additional compensation at the time, in part because no forum existed to do so.
In general, experts have told PolitiFact that invading a country to take its oil would be both illegal and unethical. In 2016, Trump mused about how the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil when it invaded to oust Saddam Hussein.
“If ‘to the victors go the spoils’ was legal doctrine, then we would have believed that (then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein) should have been able to keep Kuwait City after he invaded” in 1990, terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross told PolitiFact in 2016. “But we viewed that — quite rightly — as an act of aggression under the U.N. Charter.”
Stock futures and oil prices edged higher on Sunday evening as investors began to digest the implications of the U.S. military raid on Venezuela that captured Nicolas Maduro.
While the country has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, production has been waning for years amid U.S. sanctions, mismanagement by the Maduro regime, and underinvestment.
President Donald Trump said Saturday that Maduro’s removal will unleash a surge of investment in Venezuela’s oil industry and revive output, though analysts have said that could take years.
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s shrinking influence in the world’s oil landscape has Wall Street downplaying much near-term effects from U.S. intervention there.
“The physical global oil market situation remains the same. Oil prices have declined due to an oversupplied global oil market,” said Rob Hummel, senior portfolio manager at Tortoise Capital Management, said in a note. “The current events in Venezuela don’t change this dynamic.”
U.S. oil futures rose 0.19% to $57.43 a barrel, and Brent crude climbed 0.28% to $60.92 a barrel, with both benchmarks reversing earlier losses.
OPEC+ also backed plans to keep production steady through the first quarter and hold off on any further hikes, as oil markets still face a supply glut.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones industrial average were essentially flat, down 5 points. S&P 500 futures were up 0.10%, and Nasdaq futures added 0.32%.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury was unchanged at 4.191%. The U.S. dollar was up 0.14% against the euro and up 0.22% against the yen.
Gold rallied 1.7% to $4,403.70 per ounce, and silver jumped 5.4% to $74.86. Bitcoin edged up 2.3% to $92,265.
But the economic calendar may bring his focus back on the U.S. economy rather than more foreign adventures. The upcoming batch of numbers is also highly anticipated as they will largely be free from distortions related to the government shutdown.
On Monday, the Institute for Supply Management will release its manufacturing activity index. On Wednesday, ADP puts out its private-sector payroll report, and the Labor Department publishes job opening and turnover report.
And on Friday, the Labor Department will issue its monthly jobs report, with Wall Street expecting a gain of just 54,000 and another increase in the unemployment rate to 4.7%.
CARACAS, Venezuela — Like many other Venezuelans, Ramón Arape said the image of ex-President Nicolás Maduro in U.S. custody was a stunning — and welcome — sight.
“I confess that I felt a sense of relief when I saw the photo of Maduro in the hands of los gringos,” said Arape, 59, a welder and father of three.
Less reassuring, however, were President Trump’s comments about Washington’s determination to take over the government and the oil industry, the nation’s defining natural resource.
“We’ve already had it with outsiders — Cubans, Iranians, Chinese — and now the Americans come along and want to name leaders and sell our oil?” said Arape, referring to a series of foreign allies sought out by the socialist governments of Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez. “It’s a violation of law and sovereignty.”
Many Venezuelans are hoping for a deliverance, but not, it seems, at the cost of selling off the country’s riches. How that plays out with Trump’s view that Venezuela “stole” a U.S.-built oil industry is one of the big questions as Washington embarks on a massive nation-building endeavor in South America.
Like many other nations, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in the 20th century, a process begun in the 1970s under a U.S.-allied government in Caracas. Several U.S. oil giants later made claims of illegal expropriation against the government of Chávez, Maduro’s mentor. But few here seemed inclined to believe in Trump’s assertion, made on social media, that Venezuela must return “all of the Oil, Land and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
Sunday was just a day after the shocking events that saw U.S. forces sweep into the capital and snatch Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from Miraflores Palace, the seat of government, and fly them out of the country — and, eventually, to New York, where both face drug-trafficking charges. Both deny the charges, calling them U.S. propaganda.
Venezuelans with internet access had the opportunity to view the unlikely image of Maduro, bundled up for distinctly non-tropical temperatures and flanked by federal agents, doing a perp walk at a military base in New York and apparently telling onlookers: “Happy New Year.”
In the Venezuelan capital, life was slowly returning to a semblance of normalcy on Sunday, albeit on a weekend pace.
Cars and some public transport circulated on streets that had been deserted the day before. People ventured cautiously from their homes after spending much of Saturday indoors, fearing the explosions and a potential aftermath. Many went to church in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation. Sermons called for peace.
There was a palpable sense of relief that the threat of war had abated, at least temporarily. Many were still absorbing the almost unbelievable turn of events that has surely transformed the nation’s future — albeit in still unpredictable ways.
But there was an overriding determination, among both supporters and critics of the ousted president, that the country’s oil and other resources were sacrosanct, and not to be handed over to the United States — or anyone else.
“Really it was very emotional to finally see Maduro and Cilia handcuffed and prisoners,” said Fernando González, 29, a plumber who says he supports Marína Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and longtime opposition leader. “Those two have to pay for their crimes. For that we thank Trump. But that’s not to say we are in agreement with everything he seems to want to do.”
The president’s determination to “run” Venezuela — and take over its oil — didn’t go down well with González, a fervent nationalist in a country with a long history of nationalist activism.
“This is all a farce if they get rid of Maduro just to appropriate and sell the oil,” he said. “It can’t be that way. We want progress, change, but a transition led by Venezuelans. It can’t all be at the will of the Americans.”
González saw a role for the United States: “To help us deal with this social drama of an impoverished country.” But, he added: “They must respect our will.”
Arape, the welder, summed up the sentiment of many. “We didn’t go through all this so that Trump can name his people and take over our oil,” he said.
On Saturday, Trump had said, “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” On Sunday, however, administration officials walked back that statement, saying the U.S. would pressure the Venezuelan government to acquiesce to U.S. demands.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the threat of more military action would serve as “leverage” over the Venezuelan government.
In Caracas, confusion about the future was a prevalent sentiment, among both critics and supporters of Maduro.
“We would like to know who is really in charge,” said William Rojas, 31, a father of two who lives in the El Valle district, long a Maduro stronghold.
In his news conference Saturday, Trump said that Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, had been named interim president, a fact seemingly confirmed Sunday by Telesur, the government broadcast outlet. But Rodríguez, in an address Saturday from Miraflores Palace, demanded that Washington return the “kidnapped” Maduro, whom she called the “sole” president of the country.
“Delcy Rodríguez says that Maduro remains the president, but he’s no longer here,” said Rojas. “And how were they able to whisk him away? Who betrayed our president?”
He added, “We can’t live with the idea that the ones who really govern us are Trump and Marco Rubio! We are totally confused.”
Amid all the prevailing ambiguity, authorities called on people to revert to everyday patterns — as though Maduro were still around.
There were still no official casualty counts from Saturday’s raid. In an address, the defense secretary, Gen. Vladimir Padrino López, called the operation a “cowardly kidnapping” that was carried out “after cold-bloodedly assassinating a large part of the president’s security detail, soldiers and innocent civilians,” according to Telesur.
Padrino urged Venezuelans to return to their jobs and to school, adding, “I call on the Venezuelan people to peace, to order, to not fall to temptations or a psychological war, to threats, to the fear that they want to impose upon us.”
Special correspondent Mogollón reported from Caracas and staff writer McDonnell from Boston.
President Donald Trump said a U.S. military assault succeeded in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, both facing U.S. charges related to cocaine trafficking under newly unsealedindictments.
In a Jan. 3 press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said the U.S. would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
Trump also said Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president. Trump said Rodríguez had talked to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
However, Rodríguez criticized the U.S. military action as “brutal aggression” on state television and called for Maduro’s immediate release.
Maduro, an authoritarian, has led Venezuela since 2013, succeeding an ideological ally, Hugo Chávez, who had been in office since 1999. Under both men, U.S. relations with Venezuela frayed over foreign policy, oil and human rights.
In July 2024, Maduro declared victory following an election that international observers described as fraudulent. The country’s opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, received about 70% of the vote.
Tensions between Trump and Maduro escalated in September after the U.S. government began attacking vessels off the coast of Venezuela, killing more than 100 people, in what Trump described as an effort to thwart drug smuggling.
When a reporter asked Trump during the Mar-a-Lago press event whether he’d spoken to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado following Maduro’s arrest, Trump said Machado “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country.”
Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for democracy in Venezuela, had a 72% approval rating from Venezuelans according to a March poll by ClearPath Strategies.
Trump said without evidence that the United States’ role in governing Venezuela “won’t cost us anything” because U.S. oil companies would invest in new infrastructure in the oil-rich country. “It’s going to make a lot of money,” Trump said.
Here, we fact-checked Trump’s and Rubio’s statements from the press conference.
Rubio: “It’s just not the kind of mission that you can pre-notify (Congress about) because it endangers the mission.”
The administration’s lack of warning to Congress bucks laws and precedents.
Rubio said members of Congress were not notified in advance. Trump said the administration was concerned about Congress potentially leaking news of the administration’s decision to capture Maduro.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., praised the operation as a “decisive action.”
But Congressional Democrats said Congress should have been notified in advance. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said, “Maduro is terrible. But Trump put American servicemembers at risk with this unauthorized attack.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said Trump and his cabinet were not forthcoming about their intentions for regime change, so “we are left with no understanding of how the administration is preparing to mitigate risks to the U.S. and we have no information regarding a long-term strategy following today’s extraordinary escalation.”
The U.S. Constitution assigns Congress the right to declare war. The last time that happened was for World War II.
Since then, presidents have generally initiated military action using their constitutionally granted powers as commander in chief without an official declaration of war.
Since Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president has had to report to Congress within 48 hours of introducing the U.S. military into hostilities and terminate the use of the military within 60 days unless Congress approves. If approval is not granted and the president deems it an emergency, an additional 30 days are granted for ending operations.
In recent decades, congressional consent has usually been granted through an authorization for the use of military force. But an authorization has not been passed for operations in Venezuela. Kaine and other lawmakers have pursued legislation — so far fruitlessly — to prohibit the use of federal funds for any use of military force in or against Venezuela without Congressional authorization.
The Trump administration has whittled away at prior notification requirements. Under federal law, eight bipartisan, senior members of Congress must receive prior notice of particularly sensitive covert actions. In June 2025, the administration told Republicans, but not Democrats, about the forthcoming U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. For the Venezuela operation, it appears no lawmakers were notified in advance.
President Nicolás Maduro, accompanied by first lady Cilia Flores, greets supporters during an event marking the anniversary of a 1958 coup ousting dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, in Caracas, Venezuela, on Jan. 23, 2024. (AP)
Trump: Each U.S. boat strike off the coast of Venezuela saves 25,000 people.
The Trump administration has struck at least 32 vessels killing about 115 people in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September. Trump said previously that the boats were carrying drugs en route to the U.S. and during the press conference he said the drugs on each boat would kill “on average, 25,000 people.”
However, experts on drugs and Venezuela told PolitiFact the country plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the U.S. And the administration has provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it says were on the boats. This lack of information makes it impossible to know how many lethal doses of the drugs could have been destroyed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 73,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. That means the drugs on 32 boats would have been responsible for 800,000 deaths, nearly 11 times the number of U.S. overdose deaths in one year.
Trump: “Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide.”
There is no evidence Maduro sent members of Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua to the U.S.
The U.S. Justice Department indictment against Maduro does not mention Trump’s statement.
An April report from the federal National Intelligence Council contradicted Trump’s statements about links between Maduro and Tren de Aragua.
“While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables (Tren de Aragua) to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” the report said.
In the early 20th century, Venezuela’s long-serving dictator, Juan Vicente Gómez, allowed foreign companies almost exclusive access to the country’s oil resources.
In 1975, after decades of seeking greater control of its oil resources, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry.
“Trump’s claim that Venezuela has stolen oil and land from the U.S. is baseless,” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver, told the Washington Post. “The U.S. was much more interested in having Venezuela be a provider of oil — relatively cheap oil — than to have a production collapse in Venezuela,” Rodríguez said. As a result, the change was “relatively uncontroversial” at the time.
U.S. oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil and Gulf, now Chevron, lost about $5 billion each in assets and were compensated $1 billion each, according to news reports, the Post reported.
But Rodríguez said the companies didn’t push for additional compensation at the time, in part because no forum existed to do so.
In general, experts have told PolitiFact that invading a country to take its oil would be both illegal and unethical. In 2016, Trump mused about how the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil when it invaded to oust Saddam Hussein.
“If ‘to the victors go the spoils’ was legal doctrine, then we would have believed that (then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein) should have been able to keep Kuwait City after he invaded” in 1990, terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross told PolitiFact in 2016. “But we viewed that — quite rightly — as an act of aggression under the U.N. Charter.”
When the United States invaded Iraq in March of 2003, in a campaign to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush monitored the offensive from Camp David. He returned to Washington a few days later, telling reporters that despite “pockets of resistance,” the US was “making significant progress.”
President Donald Trump has never made much use of the secluded presidential retreat. Instead, he watched the operation to strike Venezuela and arrest President Nicolás Maduro in the early hours of Saturday morning from Mar-a-Lago, his private golf club in Palm Beach, Florida. “I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” Trump told Fox News in an interview hours after the attack.
Speaking from Mar-a-Lago’s “Tea Room” soon after, Trump announced a plan staggering in its ambition and eerily reminiscent of the foreign policy of his Republican forebear. The United States, Trump said, would “take over” and “run” Venezuela in order to replace Maduro’s regime with one chosen by the United States.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said.
Venezuelan citizens living in Spain watch Donald Trump’s press conference as they gather at Puerta del Sol square in Madrid in reaction to the US military operation in Venezuela.
PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/Getty Images
The president, who is 79, appeared exhausted. His voice was subdued and hoarse, and later in the press conference, as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine briefed the press on the operation, he seemed to struggle to stay awake. As Trump read from a stack of papers on a podium, he deviated from the script a few times, including for one lengthy aside about crime in Washington DC, where he promised “the restaurants are open, they’re happy,” and in Los Angeles, which he complained he “got no credit for” improving the fortunes of. As Trump rambled, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood behind him, stony faced, looking at the floor.
Trump eventually handed off to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. “He effed around, and he found out,” Hegseth said of Maduro in his own short remarks. Rubio spoke next, maintaining that Maduro was “not the legitimate president” of Venezuela and noting he was indicted on drug trafficking and corruption charges in the Southern District of New York in 2020. On Saturday, the Justice Department announced new charges against Maduro and his wife, who was also captured.
(CNN) — President Donald Trump on Saturday said the US would take control of Venezuela’s massive oil reserves and recruit American companies to invest billions of dollars to refurbish the country’s gutted oil industry.
Venezuela is sitting on a massive 303 billion barrels worth of crude — about a fifth of the world’s global reserves, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). That trove of crude will play a central role in the country’s future.
Oil futures don’t trade on the weekend, so the near-term impact on the price of oil is a bit of a guessing game, but Trump said the US would operate the Venezuelan government for the time being.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” Trump said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago.
A US-led revamp could eventually make Venezuela a much bigger supplier of oil and could create opportunities for Western oil companies and could serve as a new source of production. It could also keep broader prices in check, although lower prices might disincentivize some US companies from producing oil.
Even if international access were fully restored tomorrow, it could take years and incredible expense to bring Venezuelan oil production fully back online. Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company PDVSA says its pipelines haven’t been updated in 50 years, and the cost to update the infrastructure to return to peak production levels would cost $58 billion.
“For oil, this has the potential for a historic event,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group. “The Maduro regime and (former Venezuelan President) Hugo Chavez basically ransacked the Venezuelan oil industry.”
Control of Venezuela’s oil trove
Venezuela is home to the largest proven oil reserve on Earth, but its potential far outweighs its actual output: Venezuela produces only about 1 million barrels of oil per day — about 0.8% of global crude production.
That’s less than half of what it produced before Maduro took control of the country in 2013 and less than a third of the 3.5 million barrels it was pumping before the Socialist regime took over.
International sanctions on the Venezuelan government and a deep economic crisis contributed to the decline of the country’s oil industry — but so did a lack of investment and maintenance, according to the EIA. Venezuela’s energy infrastructure is deteriorating, and its capacity to produce oil has been greatly diminished over the years.
Venezuela simply doesn’t produce enough oil to make that big a difference.
Oil prices have been in check this year because of oversupply fears. OPEC has ramped up production, but demand has fallen off a bit as the global economy continues to struggle with inflation and affordability after the post-pandemic price shock.
US oil briefly rose above $60 a barrel when the Trump administration began seizing oil from Venezuelan vessels, but it has since fallen to $57 a barrel again. So the market’s reaction — if investors believe the strike is bad news for oil supply — will almost certainly be muted.
“Psychologically it might give it a bit of a boost, but Venezuela has oil that can be easily replaced by a combination of global producers,” Flynn said.
Venezuela’s oil potential
The kind of oil Venezuela is sitting on — heavy, sour crude — requires special equipment and a high level of technical prowess to produce. International oil companies have the capability to extract and refine it, but they’ve been restricted from doing business in the country.
The United States, the world’s largest oil producer, has light, sweet crude, which is good for making gasoline but not much else. Heavy, sour crude like the oil from Venezuela is crucial for certain products made in the refining process, including diesel, asphalt and fuels for factories and other heavy equipment. Diesel is in tight supply around the world — in large part because of sanctions on Venezuelan oil.
Unlocking Venezuelan oil could be particularly beneficial to the United States: Venezuela is nearby and its oil is relatively cheap — a result of its sticky, sludgy texture that requires significant refining. Most US refineries were constructed to process Venezuela’s heavy oil, and they’re significantly more efficient when they’re using Venezuelan oil compared to American oil, according to Flynn.
“If indeed this continues to go smoothly — and it looks like a masterful operation so far — and US companies are allowed to go back and rebuild the Venezuelan oil industry, it could be a game-changer for the global oil market,” Flynn said.
Trump called Venezuela’s oil business “a total bust.”
“They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place,” Trump said.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” he added.
What’s next for oil prices
It is unclear how energy prices will be impacted by the US intervention in Venezuela.
Bob McNally, president of Washington, DC-based consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, told CNN that he thinks the impact on prices would be “modest,” but he doesn’t expect much of an impact “unless we see signs of widespread social unrest and things look messy. More likely if this looks ‘stable.’”
“The prospect is then how quickly could a Venezuela that is pro-US increase its production. That will be the parlor game. Perception may race ahead of reality. People will assume Venezuela can add oil faster than they actually can,” he said.
“Venezuela can be a huge deal but not for 5 to 10 years,” McNally said.
Oil markets open on Sunday night. Prices will depend on whether Trump “can manifest the turnaround” of Venezuela’s oil sector, according to Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.
“It all hinges on whether Venezuela defies the recent history of US-led regime change efforts,” Croft told CNN. “President Trump signaled the US is back in ‘nation-building mode,’ and that US companies will make the requisite investments to ensure the revival of the oil sector. I think we need far more details before we declare ‘Mission Accomplished.’”
U.S. forces on Saturday stopped a vessel off the coast of Venezuela for the second time in less than two weeks as President Donald Trump continues to ramp up pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.Related video above: US military strikes on drug boats in Latin America spark legal concernsThe move, which was confirmed by two U.S. officials familiar with the matter, comes days after Trump announced a “blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers coming in and out of the South American country and follows the Dec. 10 seizure by American forces of an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.The officials were not authorized to discuss publicly the ongoing military operation and spoke on condition of anonymity. One official described the action as a “consented boarding,” with the tanker stopping voluntarily and allowing U.S. forces to board it.Pentagon and White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump, following the first tanker seizure this month, vowed that the U.S. would carry out a blockade of Venezuela. It all comes as Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric toward Maduro and warned that the longtime Venezuelan leader’s days in power are numbered.Trump this week demanded that Venezuela return assets that it seized from U.S. oil companies years ago, justifying anew his announcement of a “blockade” against oil tankers traveling to or from the South American country that face American sanctions.Trump cited the lost U.S. investments in Venezuela when asked about his newest tactic in a pressure campaign against Maduro, suggesting the Republican administration’s moves are at least somewhat motivated by disputes over oil investments, along with accusations of drug trafficking. Some sanctioned tankers are already diverting away from Venezuela.”We’re not going to be letting anybody going through who shouldn’t be going through,” Trump told reporters earlier this week. “You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back. They took it — they illegally took it.”U.S. oil companies dominated Venezuela’s petroleum industry until the country’s leaders moved to nationalize the sector, first in the 1970s and again in the 21st century under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Compensation offered by Venezuela was deemed insufficient, and in 2014, an international arbitration panel ordered the country’s socialist government to pay $1.6 billion to ExxonMobil.The targeting of tankers comes as Trump has ordered the Defense Department to carry out a series of attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean that his administration alleges are smuggling fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the United States and beyond.At least 104 people have been killed in 28 known strikes since early September.The strikes have faced scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and human rights activists, who say the administration has offered scant evidence that its targets are indeed drug smugglers and that the fatal strikes amount to extrajudicial killings.The Coast Guard, sometimes with help from the Navy, had typically interdicted boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea, searched for illicit cargo, and arrested the people aboard for prosecution.The administration has justified the strikes as necessary, asserting it is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels aimed at halting the flow of narcotics into the United States. Maduro faces federal charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.The U.S. in recent months has sent a fleet of warships to the region, the largest buildup of forces in generations, and Trump has stated repeatedly that land attacks are coming soon.Maduro has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from power.White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said in an interview with Vanity Fair published this week that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”
WASHINGTON (AP) —
U.S. forces on Saturday stopped a vessel off the coast of Venezuela for the second time in less than two weeks as President Donald Trump continues to ramp up pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Related video above: US military strikes on drug boats in Latin America spark legal concerns
The move, which was confirmed by two U.S. officials familiar with the matter, comes days after Trump announced a “blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers coming in and out of the South American country and follows the Dec. 10 seizure by American forces of an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.
The officials were not authorized to discuss publicly the ongoing military operation and spoke on condition of anonymity. One official described the action as a “consented boarding,” with the tanker stopping voluntarily and allowing U.S. forces to board it.
Pentagon and White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump, following the first tanker seizure this month, vowed that the U.S. would carry out a blockade of Venezuela. It all comes as Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric toward Maduro and warned that the longtime Venezuelan leader’s days in power are numbered.
Trump this week demanded that Venezuela return assets that it seized from U.S. oil companies years ago, justifying anew his announcement of a “blockade” against oil tankers traveling to or from the South American country that face American sanctions.
Trump cited the lost U.S. investments in Venezuela when asked about his newest tactic in a pressure campaign against Maduro, suggesting the Republican administration’s moves are at least somewhat motivated by disputes over oil investments, along with accusations of drug trafficking. Some sanctioned tankers are already diverting away from Venezuela.
“We’re not going to be letting anybody going through who shouldn’t be going through,” Trump told reporters earlier this week. “You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back. They took it — they illegally took it.”
U.S. oil companies dominated Venezuela’s petroleum industry until the country’s leaders moved to nationalize the sector, first in the 1970s and again in the 21st century under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Compensation offered by Venezuela was deemed insufficient, and in 2014, an international arbitration panel ordered the country’s socialist government to pay $1.6 billion to ExxonMobil.
The targeting of tankers comes as Trump has ordered the Defense Department to carry out a series of attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean that his administration alleges are smuggling fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the United States and beyond.
At least 104 people have been killed in 28 known strikes since early September.
The strikes have faced scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and human rights activists, who say the administration has offered scant evidence that its targets are indeed drug smugglers and that the fatal strikes amount to extrajudicial killings.
The Coast Guard, sometimes with help from the Navy, had typically interdicted boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea, searched for illicit cargo, and arrested the people aboard for prosecution.
The administration has justified the strikes as necessary, asserting it is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels aimed at halting the flow of narcotics into the United States. Maduro faces federal charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.
The U.S. in recent months has sent a fleet of warships to the region, the largest buildup of forces in generations, and Trump has stated repeatedly that land attacks are coming soon.
Maduro has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from power.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said in an interview with Vanity Fair published this week that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”
AND DROP OFF A TOY. THE TRAIN SCHEDULE IS ON YOUR SCREEN NOW. THE SALVATION ARMY OF BARRE VERMONT IS CLOSER TO HITTING THEIR DONATION GOAL FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON… THEY FOUND QUITE THE SURPRISE WHEN COUNTING UP THEIR DONATIONS FOR THEIR ANNUAL ‘RED KETTLE’ CAMPAIGN. THIS GOLD COIN WAS DONATED TO THEM ANONYMOUSLY… TUCKED INSIDE A TAPED DOLLAR BILL. THE TEAM AT THE SALVATION ARMY WENT TO A JEWELER TO APPRAISE IT… AND TURNS OUT ITS WORTH JUST OVER FOUR- THOUSAND DOLLARS! THE SALVATION ARMY SAYS THEY’RE AT ABOUT 30-PERCENT OF THEIR 55-THOUSAND DOLLAR GOAL… AND THAT THIS SURPRISE COIN WAS A ááHUGE BOOST FOR THEM. <00:05:15:05 Lt. Caitlin Lyle-DeLong, The Salvation Army of Barre “It helps us feed our kids that come on Tuesday nights for music lessons. It helps put oil in somebody’s oil tank, and it really means a lot that somebody is so generous that they would put something like this and anonymously. If they’re watching, we just want to say thank you and we want to express our deepest gratitude.” 00:05:39:11> ITS NOT THE FIRST TIME THIS HAS HAPPENED. A GOLD COIN WAS LEFT FOR THE CAUSE IN 20-23. THAT ONE WAS WORTH TWO-THOUSAND DOLLARS
Salvation Army discovers gold coin worth over $4K in donation bucket
Anonymous donation provides boost for Salvation Army team with two weeks left to go of accepting donations for Red Kettle Campaign
The Salvation Army of Barre, Vermont, found a little something extra when counting up their donations for their annual Red Kettle Campaign.This gold coin was donated to them anonymously, tucked inside a taped dollar bill. The team at the Salvation Army went to a jeweler to appraise it, and turns out, it’s worth $4,100.The Salvation Army said it is at about 30% of its $55,000 goal. Organizers say this surprise coin was a huge boost for them.”It helps us feed our kids that come on Tuesday nights for music lessons,” said Lt. Caitlin Lyle-DeLong. “It helps put oil in somebody’s oil tank, and it really means a lot that somebody is so generous that they would do something like this, and anonymously. If they’re watching, we just want to say thank you and we want to express our deepest gratitude.”Its not the first time the Salvation Army in Barre has gotten a donation like this. A gold coin was left for the cause in 2023. That one was worth $2,000.If you want to donate, their Red Kettle Campaign is running for two more weeks.
The Salvation Army of Barre, Vermont, found a little something extra when counting up their donations for their annual Red Kettle Campaign.
Hearst Owned
Gold coin worth $4,100 found in donation bucket
This gold coin was donated to them anonymously, tucked inside a taped dollar bill. The team at the Salvation Army went to a jeweler to appraise it, and turns out, it’s worth $4,100.
The Salvation Army said it is at about 30% of its $55,000 goal. Organizers say this surprise coin was a huge boost for them.
“It helps us feed our kids that come on Tuesday nights for music lessons,” said Lt. Caitlin Lyle-DeLong. “It helps put oil in somebody’s oil tank, and it really means a lot that somebody is so generous that they would do something like this, and anonymously. If they’re watching, we just want to say thank you and we want to express our deepest gratitude.”
Its not the first time the Salvation Army in Barre has gotten a donation like this. A gold coin was left for the cause in 2023. That one was worth $2,000.
If you want to donate, their Red Kettle Campaign is running for two more weeks.
AND DROP OFF A TOY. THE TRAIN SCHEDULE IS ON YOUR SCREEN NOW. THE SALVATION ARMY OF BARRE VERMONT IS CLOSER TO HITTING THEIR DONATION GOAL FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON… THEY FOUND QUITE THE SURPRISE WHEN COUNTING UP THEIR DONATIONS FOR THEIR ANNUAL ‘RED KETTLE’ CAMPAIGN. THIS GOLD COIN WAS DONATED TO THEM ANONYMOUSLY… TUCKED INSIDE A TAPED DOLLAR BILL. THE TEAM AT THE SALVATION ARMY WENT TO A JEWELER TO APPRAISE IT… AND TURNS OUT ITS WORTH JUST OVER FOUR- THOUSAND DOLLARS! THE SALVATION ARMY SAYS THEY’RE AT ABOUT 30-PERCENT OF THEIR 55-THOUSAND DOLLAR GOAL… AND THAT THIS SURPRISE COIN WAS A ááHUGE BOOST FOR THEM. <00:05:15:05 Lt. Caitlin Lyle-DeLong, The Salvation Army of Barre “It helps us feed our kids that come on Tuesday nights for music lessons. It helps put oil in somebody’s oil tank, and it really means a lot that somebody is so generous that they would put something like this and anonymously. If they’re watching, we just want to say thank you and we want to express our deepest gratitude.” 00:05:39:11> ITS NOT THE FIRST TIME THIS HAS HAPPENED. A GOLD COIN WAS LEFT FOR THE CAUSE IN 20-23. THAT ONE WAS WORTH TWO-THOUSAND DOLLARS
Salvation Army discovers gold coin worth over $4K in donation bucket
Anonymous donation provides boost for Salvation Army team with two weeks left to go of accepting donations for Red Kettle Campaign
The Salvation Army of Barre, Vermont, found a little something extra when counting up their donations for their annual Red Kettle Campaign.This gold coin was donated to them anonymously, tucked inside a taped dollar bill. The team at the Salvation Army went to a jeweler to appraise it, and turns out, it’s worth $4,100.The Salvation Army said it is at about 30% of its $55,000 goal. Organizers say this surprise coin was a huge boost for them.”It helps us feed our kids that come on Tuesday nights for music lessons,” said Lt. Caitlin Lyle-DeLong. “It helps put oil in somebody’s oil tank, and it really means a lot that somebody is so generous that they would do something like this, and anonymously. If they’re watching, we just want to say thank you and we want to express our deepest gratitude.”Its not the first time the Salvation Army in Barre has gotten a donation like this. A gold coin was left for the cause in 2023. That one was worth $2,000.If you want to donate, their Red Kettle Campaign is running for two more weeks.
The Salvation Army of Barre, Vermont, found a little something extra when counting up their donations for their annual Red Kettle Campaign.
Hearst Owned
Gold coin worth $4,100 found in donation bucket
This gold coin was donated to them anonymously, tucked inside a taped dollar bill. The team at the Salvation Army went to a jeweler to appraise it, and turns out, it’s worth $4,100.
The Salvation Army said it is at about 30% of its $55,000 goal. Organizers say this surprise coin was a huge boost for them.
“It helps us feed our kids that come on Tuesday nights for music lessons,” said Lt. Caitlin Lyle-DeLong. “It helps put oil in somebody’s oil tank, and it really means a lot that somebody is so generous that they would do something like this, and anonymously. If they’re watching, we just want to say thank you and we want to express our deepest gratitude.”
Its not the first time the Salvation Army in Barre has gotten a donation like this. A gold coin was left for the cause in 2023. That one was worth $2,000.
If you want to donate, their Red Kettle Campaign is running for two more weeks.
