MIAMI — Two cargo ships — the Hong Kong-flagged Sea Horse and the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin — with Russian oil and fuel were on their way to Cuba on Wednesday, according to maritime intelligence companies, The Financial Times reported.
Granma, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, remained offline on Wednesday afternoon, but used X to report that humanitarian aid from the left-wing Nuestra América Convoy had arrived.
“We are ready to provide all possible assistance,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Russian about Cuba during a briefing on Tuesday, The Moscow Times reported.
On Tuesday night, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel released a statement on X, saying President Donald Trump intended to “announce plans to seize the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to strangle to make us surrender.”
Díaz-Canel added that amid a “fierce economic war” that has resulted in “collective punishment,” he was certain that “any external aggressor will clash with an impregnable resistance.”
On Monday, Cuban Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Perez-Oliva Fraga announced that the Cuban diaspora will be able to own businesses in Cuba. State Secretary Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that it wasn’t enough.
“Cuba has an economy that doesn’t work in a political and governmental system that can’t fix it, so they have to change dramatically,” Rubio told reporters in the White House.
Cuba was recovering from a nationwide blackout that started on Monday and lasted over 29 hours.
The Unión Eléctrica de Cuba, the state-owned company, announced that the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant, an oil-fired power station in Matanzas, was back in service on Tuesday.
There were protests at sundown. The Wall Street Journal reported, “residents in Morón, Cuba, sacked the Communist Party headquarters and set furniture ablaze.” The Guardian reported five protesters were arrested for vandalism.
“A Cuban night is no longer quiet. It is filled with the metallic rhythm of thousands of families striking spoons against empty pots in the darkness. This is the sound of a funeral for a failed ideology,” Rep. Carlos A. Giménez wrote in an opinion published by Fox News on Wednesday.
Trump cut Cuba’s Venezuelan oil supply in January after the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was in a federal prison in New York facing narco-terrorism charges. Trump also used tariffs to cut off Cuba’s foreign oil supply.
Mexico has continued delivering humanitarian aid. Both Díaz-Canel and Trump recently acknowledged there were ongoing U.S.-Cuba talks.
More on Cuba
- Cuba’s leader says US aggression would meet ‘impregnable resistance’
- Islandwide blackout hits Cuba as it struggles with deepening energy crisis
- Cuban Americans in Miami’s Little Havana ask communists to free island
- Trump, Rubio call for new Cuban leaders as latest blackout underscores deepening economic crisis
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#EEUU amenaza públicamente a #Cuba, casi a diario, con derrocar por la fuerza el orden constitucional. Y usa un indignante pretexto: las duras limitaciones de la debilitada economía que ellos han agredido y pretendido aislar hace más de seis décadas.
— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) March 18, 2026
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