As Cuba grapples with a crumbling power grid and heightened tensions with the Trump administration, Havana’s top diplomat said Sunday that the Cuban military is ready to defend itself against the U.S.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker that aired Sunday, Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío also rejected President Donald Trump's demand that Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel step down along with other top communist Cuba leaders.
“Our military is always prepared, and in fact it is preparing these days for the possibility of military aggression,” Fernández de Cossío said. “We would be naive [not to consider it], looking at what’s happening around the world.”
Trump has for months suggested Cuba’s government is on the verge of collapse. After Cuba's electric grid collapsed last week — and again over the weekend — spurring an island-wide blackout, Trump told reporters he believed he'd soon have “the honor of taking Cuba.”
“Taking Cuba in some form … whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth," Trump said. "They’re a very weakened nation right now.”
Said Fernández de Cossío: "We don’t know what they’re talking about."
"I can tell you this: Cuba is a sovereign country and has the right to be a sovereign country," he said..
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“The nature of the Cuban government, the structure of the Cuban government and the members of the Cuban government are not part of the negotiation," he said." "That is something that no sovereign country negotiates."
Fernández de Cossío remarks come the same day Cuba began restoring its energy system the day after a nationwide collapse of the entire grid left millions of people in the dark for the third time this month.
Some 72,000 customers in the capital, among them five hospitals, had electricity again early Sunday, according to a report from the state-run Electric Union and the Ministry of Energy and Mines, but it's only a fraction of Havana’s total population of approximately 2 million.
In talking about the energy crisis on the island, Fernández de Cossío said: “What’s happening today is that the U.S. is threatening with coercive measures countries that might export fuel to Cuba, and that’s the reason why Cuba has not received fuel for a long time.”
"It is very severe, and we are acting as proactively as we can to cope with the situation," he said. "We do hope that fuel will reach Cuba one way or the other, and that this boycott that the United States has been imposing does not last and cannot be sustained forever.”
Cuba is currently facing an unprecedented energy crisis. Its aging grid has drastically eroded in recent years, but the government has blamed the outages on a U.S. energy blockade, after President Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba.
Another reason Cuba has been struggling with dwindling oil is the removal by the U.S. of Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro, which halted critical petroleum shipments from the nation that had been a steadfast ally to Havana.
Cuban government officials said the island has not received oil from foreign suppliers for three months. Cuba produces barely 40% of the fuel it needs to power its economy.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
