Cuban officials have held talks with the US government, the country’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, confirmed on Friday, amid growing pain inflicted by the severe US fuel blockade and frequent power outages.
“These conversations have aimed to find solutions through dialogue to the bilateral differences we have between the two nations,” Díaz-Canel said in a pre-recorded statement to senior communist officials.
Those differences are stark and well-known: Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State and son of Cuban immigrants, has made clear that he wants regime change in Havana, while Donald Trump this week repeated his calls for a “friendly takeover,” before telling reporters: “It may not be a friendly takeover.”
After the U.S. military’s successful kidnapping of Venezuelan President and Cuba ally Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump signed an executive order that effectively placed the Caribbean island under an oil blockade. Díaz-Canel confirmed on Friday that no fuel has been coming in for three months.
In his statements to Communist Party leaders, and later to carefully selected journalists, Díaz-Canel was careful not to offer much more information, beyond efforts to increase national oil production and keep the electrical grid operational in some form.
Recently, large numbers of people have been banging pots and pans in the streets at night to signal their frustration, and a group of students from the University of Havana organized a sit-in on the university steps.
“Whenever we have been in tense situations in relations with the United States, efforts have been made to find channels of dialogue,” Díaz-Canel told reporters. “I think the most recent example was the conversations with President Obama.”
Despite the lack of information, there were many signs to read, most notably the presence of 94-year-old Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson of former President Raúl Castro, 41, during the statement and press conference.
Rodríguez Castro has no official role in the government and until recently was best known as a businessman and his grandfather’s security chief. But in recent weeks Washington has widely leaked that “Raulito,” as he is often known, has been meeting with U.S. officials, including during the Caricom Caribbean leaders meeting held in February in St. Kitts.
Carlos Alzugaray, Cuba’s former ambassador to the EU, said it was a clear message of unity from the Cuban government. “It is not the narrative that the United States Department of State wants to project,” he said. “That narrative is that this is a government in panic and that the United States is in talks with the Castro family, that Raúl Castro is negotiating his exit and is willing to sacrifice Díaz-Canel. That is clearly not the case. The president insisted on saying that the talks were led by Raúl Castro and himself.”
Cuba preceded its announcement with the news that it will release 51 prisoners in the coming days, under an agreement with the Vatican. So far, it has not been announced who will be included. According to Prisoners Defenders, Cuba has 1,214 prisoners of conscience.
According to Michael Bustamante, professor of Cuban and Cuban American studies at the University of Miami, the names will be important, especially if they include Luís Manuel Otero Alcántara, an artist and dissident who was arrested during the protests that shook Cuba in July 2021, and whose imprisonment still offends many Cubans.
“That could be taken as a significant adjustment,” he said. “But the conditions under which they are released are important. If they have a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads and could be sent back to prison at any time, that doesn’t really solve the problem.” He also said the potential number of prisoners to be released – 51 – is smaller than the 53 Cuba released during negotiations with Barack Obama’s administration in December 2014, at the beginning of that US administration’s thaw in relations.
He also suggested that Díaz-Canel made a mistake by comparing Cuba’s willingness to proceed in these talks with the way they handled the negotiations with Obama. “If you know nothing else about the Trump administration, you should know that the president hates Obama, so if you’re trying to de-escalate, comparing what you’re doing to what you did under Obama is not the way you want to go.”
There was no immediate response to Cuba’s statement from the White House.
