{"id":440820,"date":"2026-01-31T12:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T12:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/440820\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T12:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T12:30:08","slug":"president-diaz-canel-slams-trumps-bid-to-suffocate-cubas-economy-donald-trump-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/440820\/","title":{"rendered":"President Diaz-Canel slams Trump\u2019s bid to \u2018suffocate\u2019 Cuba\u2019s economy | Donald Trump News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cuba\u2019s President Miguel Diaz-Canel has denounced what he called an attempt by his United States counterpart, Donald Trump, to \u201csuffocate\u201d the sanctions-hit country\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n

Trump signed<\/a> an executive order on Thursday threatening additional tariffs on countries that sell oil to Cuba, the latest move in Washington\u2019s campaign of pressure on Havana. The order alleged that the government of communist-run Cuba was an \u201cunusual and extraordinary threat\u201d<\/a>\u00a0to US national security.<\/p>\n

In a social media post on Friday, Diaz-Canel said that\u00a0under \u201ca false and baseless pretext\u201d, Trump plans \u201cto suffocate\u201d Cuba\u2019s economy by slapping tariffs \u201con countries that sovereignly trade oil\u201d with it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis new measure reveals the fascist, criminal and genocidal nature of a clique that has hijacked the interests of the American people for purely personal ends,\u201d he said, in an apparent allusion to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American and a known anti-Cuban government hawk.<\/p>\n

Cuba, which is suffering rolling electricity blackouts blamed on fuel shortages, was cut off from critical supplies of Venezuelan oil after the US abducted Venezuela\u2019s President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in a bloody military night raid on the capital, Caracas, earlier this month. At least 32 members of Cuba\u2019s armed forces and intelligence agencies were killed<\/a> in the January 3 attack.<\/p>\n

The US has since taken effective control of Venezuela\u2019s oil sector, and Trump, a Republican, has issued threats against other left-wing governments in the region, promising to stop oil shipments previously sent to Cuba.<\/p>\n

Cuba\u2019s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez on Friday declared an \u201cinternational emergency\u201d in response to Trump\u2019s move, which he said constitutes \u201can unusual and extraordinary threat\u201d.<\/p>\n

Venezuela\u2019s government also condemned the measure in a statement on Friday, saying it violates international law and the principles of global commerce.<\/p>\n

Reporting from Cuba\u2019s capital, Al Jazeera\u2019s Ed Augustin said Trump\u2019s announcement \u201cis a massive psychological blow\u201d, noting that analysts describe it as the \u201cmost powerful economic blow the United States has ever dealt the island\u201d.<\/p>\n

Days after Maduro\u2019s abduction and transfer to the US, Trump urged Cuba to make a deal \u201cbefore it is too late,\u201d without specifying what kind of agreement he was referring to.<\/p>\n

In a post on social media, Trump suggested Rubio could become the president of Cuba. \u201cSounds good to me!\u201d he wrote on his Truth Social platform.<\/p>\n

\u2018There\u2019s no solution\u2019<\/p>\n

In Havana, residents expressed anger at Trump\u2019s tariff threat, which will only make life harder for Cubans already struggling with an increase in US sanctions.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy food is going bad. We haven\u2019t had electricity since 6am,\u201d Yenia Leon told Al Jazeera. \u201cYou can\u2019t sleep. You have to buy food every day. There\u2019s no solution to the power situation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a war,\u201d Lazaro Alfonso, an 89-year-old retired graphic designer, told The Associated Press news agency, describing Trump as the \u201csheriff of the world\u201d and saying he feels like he is living in the Wild West, where anything goes.<\/p>\n

\"AA man sells vegetables on the street during a blackout in Havana on January 22 [Norlys Perez\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

Alfonso, who lived through the severe economic depression in the 1990s known as the \u201cSpecial Period\u201d following cuts in Soviet aid, said the current situation in Cuba is worse, given the severe blackouts, a lack of basic goods and a scarcity of fuel.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only thing that\u2019s missing here in Cuba \u2026 is for bombs to start falling,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said she would seek alternatives to continue helping Cuba after Trump\u2019s announcement following a decision this week to temporarily halt oil shipments to the island amid heightened rhetoric from Trump.<\/p>\n

Mexico became a key supplier of fuel to Cuba, along with Russia, after the US sanctions on Venezuela paralysed the delivery of crude oil to the island.<\/p>\n

Sheinbaum said cutting off oil shipments to Cuba could trigger a \u201cfar-reaching humanitarian crisis\u201d on the island, affecting transportation, hospitals and access to food. She did not say whether Mexico would cut shipments of oil or refined products to Cuba, which \u200cshe said accounted for 1 percent of Mexico\u2019s production.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur interest is that the Cuban people don\u2019t suffer,\u201d Sheinbaum said, adding that she had instructed her foreign minister to contact the US \u200cState Department to better understand the scope of the executive order.<\/p>\n

Mexico supplied 44 percent of Cuban oil imports and Venezuela exported 33 percent until last month, while some 10 percent of Cuban oil is sourced from Russia. Some oil is also sourced from Algeria, according to The Financial Times figures.<\/p>\n

In November last year, a senior United Nations expert said<\/a> the long-running US sanctions on Cuba must be lifted as they are \u201ccausing significant effects across all aspects of life\u201d.<\/p>\n

The US imposed a near-total trade embargo on Cuba in 1962, with the goal of toppling the government put in place by Fidel Castro after he took power in a 1959 revolution. Castro himself was the target of numerous assassination attempts by the US\u2019s Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA.<\/p>\n

Alena Douhan, special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on human rights, said the \u201cextensive regime of economic, trade and financial restrictions\u201d against Cuba marks the longest-running unilateral sanctions policy in US history.<\/p>\n

She noted that there are shortages of food, medicine, electricity, water, essential machinery and spare parts in Cuba, while a growing emigration of skilled workers, including medical staff, engineers and teachers, is further straining the country.<\/p>\n

The accumulative effect has \u201csevere consequences for the enjoyment of human rights, including the rights to life, food, health and development\u201d, Douhan said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cuba\u2019s President Miguel Diaz-Canel has denounced what he called an attempt by his United States counterpart, Donald Trump,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,4868,3668,12,3075,3140,3,21,19,22,20,25,1209,24],"class_list":["post-440820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-business-and-economy","tag-cuba","tag-donald-trump","tag-human-rights","tag-latin-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-canada","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}