Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said his government was in talks with the United States, marking the first official confirmation of discussions between the two countries amid Cuba’s worsening energy crisis.
On Friday, Diaz-Canel said the exchange aims to address bilateral differences and explore possible cooperation.
“They were aimed at finding a solution through dialogue to the bilateral differences between our two nations,” Díaz-Canel said, adding that “these exchanges were facilitated by international factors.”
“The aim was to find out the willingness of both parties to take concrete steps for the benefit of the people of both countries,” he said.
However, he did not elaborate on the factors or give details of the discussions.
Marco Rubio’s secret meeting
U.S. officials said Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, met with Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the grandson of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, on the sidelines of a meeting of Caribbean community leaders in St. Kitts and Nevis in late February.
The meeting was said to have been quiet, with officials speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
At the time, Rubio declined to say who he met with during the regional convention.
Cuba is plagued by an energy crisis
The talks come as Cuba struggles with severe energy shortages. Díaz-Canel said no oil shipments had arrived on the island for three months, blaming the situation on the US energy blockade.
“Even with everything we’re putting together, we still need oil,” he said.
The government relies on natural gas, solar power plants and thermal power plants to generate electricity, but fuel shortages have forced two power plants to shut down and curtail production at solar facilities.
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Outages affected millions
The western region of Cuba was hit by a major blackout last week, leaving millions without electricity. The government attributed the outage to a broken boiler in the thermal power plant, which triggered a shutdown of the national power grid.
Díaz-Canel said the power shortage disrupted communications, education and transport, while hospitals were forced to postpone tens of thousands of operations.
“The impact is huge,” he said.
Oil supplies from Venezuela have stopped
The situation worsened after oil supplies from Venezuela were halted following US action against the country and the arrest of its president, Nicolás Maduro.
Since then, the Donald Trump administration has warned Cuba that it could face a similar outcome.
Trump told a gathering of Latin American leaders in Florida last week: “They don’t have money, they don’t have oil. They have a bad philosophy. They have a bad regime that’s been bad for a long time.”
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