WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Friday that the US is in talks with Havana and raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba” without offering any details on what he meant.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a trip to Texas, Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in discussions with Cuban leaders “at a very high level.”
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” the president said. “They have no money. They have no anything right now. But they’re talking to us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
He added: “We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Trump didn’t clarify his comments but seemed to indicate that the situation with Cuba, a communist-run island that has been among Washington’s bitterest adversaries for decades, was coming to a critical point. The White House did not respond to requests for more information Friday.
The president also said that Cuba “is, to put it mildly, a failed nation” and “they want our help.”
His remarks came two days after the Cuban government reported that a Florida-registered speedboat carrying 10 armed Cubans from the US opened fire on soldiers off the island’s north coast. Four of the armed Cubans were killed, and six were injured in responding gunfire, according to Cuba’s government. One Cuban official also was injured.
Cuba has been on Trump’s mind since at least early January, after US forces ousted one of Havana’s closest allies, Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro. Trump suggested in the aftermath of that raid that military action in Cuba might not be necessary because the island’s economy was weak enough — particularly in the absence of oil shipments from Venezuela that stopped after Maduro was taken into custody — to soon collapse on its own.
“We’ve had a lot of years of dealing with Cuba. I’ve been hearing about Cuba since I’m a little boy. But they’re in big trouble,” he said Friday.
Then, noting the exile community from the island living in the US, Trump said there could be something coming that “I think  very positive for the people that were expelled, or worse, from Cuba and live here.” He did not elaborate.
The US has maintained a strict trade embargo on Cuba since 1962, the year after a failed, CIA-sponsored invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs. Trump nonetheless indicated earlier this month that talks with Cuban officials were underway.
Cuba’s government confirmed earlier this week that it was communicating with US officials following the shooting of the American boat. Rubio has said the US Department of Homeland Security and Coast Guard are investigating what happened.
An executive order that Trump signed in late January pledged to impose tariffs on countries providing oil to Cuba, threatening to further cripple a country already plagued by a deepening energy crisis, though US authorities have since indicated that oil from Venezuela can be sold to Cuban interests in some cases.
Carlos Fernández de Cossío, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, posted, then later deleted on Friday that “the US maintains its fuel embargo against Cuba in full force, and its impact as a form of collective punishment is unwavering.”
“Nothing announced in recent days changes this reality,” he wrote on X before the post was removed. “The possibility of conditional sales to the private sector already existed and does not alleviate the impact on the Cuban population.”
Meanwhile, 40-plus US civil society organizations sent a letter to Congress on Friday asking that it “press the Trump administration to reverse its aggressive policy toward Cuba” and saying that efforts to cut oil shipments to the Caribbean island would spark a humanitarian collapse.
Signees included the Alliance of Baptists, ActionAid USA and the Presbyterian Church.
“Policies that deliberately impose hunger and mass hardship on millions of civilians constitute a form of collective punishment, and as such are a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” the letter reads.