WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. is in talks with Havana and raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba” without offering any details on what he meant.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a trip to Texas, Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in discussions with Cuban leaders “at a very high level.”
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” the president said. “They have no money. They have nothing right now. But they’re talking to us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
He added, “We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Trump didn’t clarify his comments but seemed to indicate that the situation with Cuba, a communist-run island that has been among Washington’s bitterest adversaries for decades, was coming to a critical point. The White House did not respond to requests for more information on Friday.
The president also said that Cuba “is, to put it mildly, a failed nation” and “they want our help.”
His remarks came two days after the Cuban government reported that a Florida-registered speedboat carrying 10 armed Cubans from the U.S. opened fire on soldiers off the island’s north coast. Four of the armed Cubans were killed, and six were injured in responding gunfire, according to Cuba’s government. One Cuban official was also injured.
Cuba has been on Trump’s mind since at least early January, after U.S. forces ousted one of Havana’s closest allies, Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro. Trump suggested in the aftermath of that raid that military action in Cuba might not be necessary because the island’s economy was weak enough — particularly in the absence of oil shipments from Venezuela that stopped after Maduro was taken into custody — to soon collapse on its own.
“We’ve had a lot of years of dealing with Cuba. I’ve been hearing about Cuba since I’m a little boy. But they’re in big trouble,” he said Friday.
Then, noting the exile community from the island living in the U.S., Trump said there could be something coming that “I think (is) very positive for the people that were expelled, or worse, from Cuba and live here.” He did not elaborate.
The U.S. has maintained a strict trade embargo on Cuba since 1962, the year after a failed, CIA-sponsored invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs. Trump nonetheless indicated earlier this month that talks with Cuban officials were underway.
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