HAVANA - MIAMI — Cubans, both in Havana and Miami, recognized that President Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela will have an impact on people on the island.
On Saturday, at a rally with about 30,000 Cubans near the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Maira Fernandez said she had worked as a teacher for two years in Venezuela and was worried about the safety of her godson in Caracas.
“That’s why I am here: To support my family in Venezuela and to support the Venezuelan people,” Fernandez said.
Another woman at the rally said that she was concerned about U.S. actions based on the fallacy that the Caribbean and Latin America are the country’s backyard.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel stood near a defiant sculpture of a Cuban flag painted in gray and juxtaposed over the U.S. Embassy. He said 32 Cuban nationals who were protecting Maduro “at the request” of Venezuela died “in combat actions.”
Díaz-Canel described the U.S. military operation as “a criminal assault against our America, a zone of peace” and as “a violation of the sovereignty of a nation that is a symbol of independence, dignity, and solidarity.”
Away from the rally, in Havana, some Cubans said the violence saddened them, and others said they were worried about scarcity after losing the help that the country has been receiving from Venezuela.
With the U.S. embargo in place, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro became allies and co-founded the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America in 2004. Venezuela quickly became Cuba’s energy lifeline.
To keep the lights on, the island’s dilapidated energy system has relied on oil imports. Cuba’s Unión Eléctrica has not provided updated data, but University of Texas experts have reported a reliance on oil from Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia.
Vicente de la O Levy, Cuba’s minister of energy and mines, said in April that there were concerns about not having enough fuel for thermoelectric plants, according to the Caribbean Council.
“We’re talking about domestic crude oil and accompanying gas to generate electricity,” De La O Levy told the council.
SOUTH FLORIDA
U.S. State Secretary Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, said the U.S. military is enforcing an oil embargo. Before Maduro’s capture, the U.S. had been seizing Venezuelan oil in the Caribbean.
“If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I would be concerned,” Rubio said while standing near Trump on Saturday in Palm Beach.
On Tuesday, in Miami’s Little Havana, at La Ventanita in Versailles, on Eighth Street, Cubans and Cuban Americans said they hope that Trump’s vision could bring prosperity to their beloved island.
“Take it out, the Castro regime in Cuba, take it out,” said Osvaldo Hernandez, a patron at La Ventanita along Eighth Street, where thousands celebrated the death of Fidel Castro in 2016.
While on Air Force One, Trump told reporters that he sought to implement his vision of U.S. “dominance” in the Western Hemisphere through his new “Donroe Doctrine” in Venezuela. He also talked about Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland.
“Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know how they, if they are going to hold out, but Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil,” Trump said on Saturday. “They’re not getting any of it, and Cuba literally is ready to fall, and you have a lot of great Cuban Americans that are going to be very happy about this.”
U.S. Rep. Carlos A. Giménez, a Cuban American born in Havana, told Local 10 News that Trump’s strategy in Cuba was not about the type of U.S. military action that was executed in Venezuela.
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