Cuban president confirms talks with Trump officials amid US blockade | Cuba
Cuban officials are in talks with the U.S. government, the country’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, confirmed on Friday, amid growing pain from a punitive U.S. fuel blockade and frequent power outages.
“These talks were aimed at finding a solution to the bilateral differences between the two countries through dialogue,” Díaz-Canel told senior communist officials in a pre-recorded statement.
These differences are clear and well-known: Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state and the son of Cuban immigrants, made clear in Havana that he wanted regime change, while Donald Trump this week repeated his call for a “friendly takeover” and later told reporters: “This may not be a friendly takeover.”
After the U.S. military successfully kidnapped Venezuelan president and Cuban ally Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump signed an executive order that effectively placed the Caribbean island under an oil blockade. Díaz-Canel confirmed on Friday that there had been no fuel entry for three months.
In his speech to Communist party leaders and then to carefully selected reporters, Díaz-Canel was careful not to offer any further information beyond his efforts to increase domestic oil production and keep the power grid somehow functioning.
Recently, large numbers of people have been banging pans on the streets at night to express their frustration, and a group of students at the University of Havana staged a sit-in on the university steps.
“Whenever we encounter a tense situation in relations with the United States, we make efforts to find channels for dialogue,” Díaz-Canel told reporters. “I believe the most recent example was the meetings with President Obama.”
Despite the lack of information, there were plenty of signs to read during the statement and press conference, particularly the presence of Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the 41-year-old grandson of 94-year-old former president Raúl Castro.
Rodríguez Castro has no official role in the government and until recently was best known as a businessman and his grandfather’s security chief. But over the past few weeks, it has been widely leaked by Washington that “Raulito,” as he is often known, met with U.S. officials, including at the Caricom meeting of Caribbean leaders in Saint Kitts in February.
Carlos Alzugaray, Cuba’s former ambassador to the EU, said it was a clear message of unity from the Cuban government. “This is not the story the U.S. State Department wants to portray,” he said. “The narrative is that the government is in a panic and that the United States is meeting with the Castro family, that Raúl Castro is negotiating his own exit, and that he is ready to sacrifice Díaz-Canel. This is clearly not the case. The president has stated that the talks are being driven by Raúl Castro and himself.”
Before the announcement, Cuba had announced that it would release 51 prisoners in the coming days within the scope of the agreement made with the Vatican. It has not been announced yet who will be involved. According to Prisoners Defenders, there are 1,214 prisoners of conscience in Cuba.
According to Michael Bustamante, head of Cuban and Cuban-American studies at the University of Miami, names will be important; especially if these names include the artist and dissident Luís Manuel Otero Alcántara, who was arrested during the protests that roiled Cuba in July 2021 and whose imprisonment still disturbs many Cubans.
“This can be considered an important regulation,” he said. “But the conditions of their release are important. If they have the sword of Damocles over their heads and there’s a possibility they could be sent back to prison at any time, that doesn’t really solve the issue.” He also said the number of potential prisoners scheduled to be released (51) was fewer than the 53 Cubans released during negotiations with Barack Obama’s administration in December 2014, when relations began to thaw.
He also suggested that Díaz-Canel made a mistake in comparing Cuba’s willingness to continue these talks with how he handled negotiations with Obama. “If you know nothing else about the Trump administration, you should know that the president hates Obama, so if you’re trying to de-escalate tensions, comparing what you did to what you did with Obama is not the route you want to go.”
There has been no response from the White House yet to Cuba’s statement.
