As Cuba nears its fourth week under crippling Trump administration sanctions that have shuttered hospitals and starved people of food, President Donald Trump boasted Monday at how the brutal campaign was an effective negotiation tactic.
“Cuba right now is a failed nation, they don't even have jet fuel for airplanes to take off, they're clogging up their runway,” Trump proudly boasted to reporters aboard Air Force One late Monday night. “I have Marco Rubio talking to Cuba right now, and they should absolutely make a deal. It's really a humanitarian threat.”
The United States has sought to topple the Cuban government since the late 1950s after revolutionaries ousted the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, who historians say maintained Cuba as a “virtual slave state” to the benefit of American companies. The United States has imposed a crippling embargo on the Caribbean nation since 1958.
On Jan. 29, however, Trump signed an executive order that imposed new tariffs and penalties on any nation supplying Cuba with oil, setting the nation on the path to an outright humanitarian collapse, the United Nations warned earlier this month.
“So we'll see how it all turns out, but Cuba and us, we are talking,” Trump continued. “In the meantime, there's an embargo – there's no oil, there's no money, there's no anything!”
Trump was also asked whether he would consider invading Cuba in a similar manner to the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela and capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro. Trump refused to rule out such an attack.
“I don't want to answer that, why would I answer that?” Trump scoffed. “If I was, it wouldn't be a very tough operation, as you can... figure. But I don't think that'll be necessary.”