President Trump says he will “take care of Cuba” in speech to Latin American leaders
“We’re going to take care of Cuba,” President Donald Trump told a gathering of Latin American leaders, touting recent U.S. military operations in Venezuela and Iran.
HAVANA – Cuba’s national power grid collapsed on March 16, leaving about 10 million people without power as the U.S.-imposed oil blockade crippled Cuba’s already aging power generation system, the country’s grid operator announced.
Power grid operator UNE said on social media that it was investigating the cause of the outage. The power outage was the latest in a series of widespread outages that lasted for hours or days and sparked a weekend of rare violent protests in the communist-ruled country.
The United States has ratcheted up pressure on longtime enemy Cuba this year after detaining Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Cuba’s most important foreign patron, in January.
President Donald Trump has halted oil shipments from Venezuela to Cuba, threatened to impose tariffs on countries selling oil to Cuba and crippled the Caribbean island’s already outdated power grid.
Cuba announced Friday that it had entered talks with the United States in hopes of calming the crisis. President Trump has said in recent weeks that Cuba is on the brink of collapse and wants a deal with the United States.
Systems that work with fumes
Cuba has accepted only two small vessels carrying oil imports this year, according to LSEG ship tracking data obtained by Reuters on Monday.
The first tanker discharged its fuel at the Havana port in January, but the fuel had previously come from Mexico, a regular supplier to the island. A second ship from Jamaica vented liquefied petroleum gas, known as cooking gas, in February.
Venezuela, once Cuba’s main oil supplier, has not sent fuel to Cuba this year.
Last month, Venezuela’s state-run company PDVSA loaded gasoline onto a tanker that was being used to transport fuel to Cuba. However, the ship has not left Venezuelan waters, according to PDVSA documents and tanker monitoring data.
Satellite images analyzed by TankerTrackers.com show that there have been no large-scale imports through Cuba’s main hubs of Matanzas and Moa this year. These sites typically handle crude oil for refining and fuel oil for power generation. It added that there has also been no import activity for more than a month at the ports of Havana and Cienfuegos.
