Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez had previously said he would not negotiate with Trump.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Jan. 31 that his administration is starting to engage in talks with Cuban leaders after he moved to cut off oil deliveries from Venezuela and announced new tariffs on any countries selling petroleum to the communist-run island.
“We’re starting to talk with Cuba. They need help on a humanitarian basis,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One en route to Florida on Saturday night. “A lot of people in our country were treated very badly by Cuba … we’d like to be able to have them go back to a vote in their country, which they haven’t seen in their country for many, many decades.”
Trump said he is working toward a deal where Cuban exiles could theoretically return to the island and vote for the first time since before the culmination of Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in 1959, suggesting the United States would “be kind” to the nation.
Earlier in his remarks, Trump said Cuba doesn’t have to face a humanitarian crisis and that it would “probably come to us and want to make a deal so Cuba would be free again.”
“They have no money, they have no oil. They lived off Venezuela’s money and oil, and none of that is coming,” Trump said, adding that he had told the president of the island’s second-largest supplier of oil—Mexico—to stop sending petroleum to Cuba.
Trump did not offer further details on the discussions his administration is having with Cuban officials, or what a negotiated deal with the country might look like.
The U.S. president’s comments come three days after he signed an executive order imposing new tariffs on any countries that “directly or indirectly” supply Cuba with oil.
“I find that the policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Cuba constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” the executive order states.
Trump’s order accuses the Cuban regime of aligning itself with Russia, China, Iran, and the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups and says that opposing the communist regime is essential for U.S. national security.
By Jacob Burg
