(Adnkronos) – Cuba’s already precarious economic situation risks reaching the brink of collapse with the blockade on Venezuelan oil that Donald Trump’s United States is trying to impose. The operations to intercept tankers loaded with Venezuelan crude oil, launched in recent days by American forces in the Caribbean Sea, risk compromising the low-cost oil supplies that Nicolas Maduro guarantees to Havana, allowing the country, which experiences continuous blackouts due to lack of electricity, to stay afloat.
If these supplies were to stop, or decrease significantly, this would be devastating for Cubans, the Wall Street Journal writes today. “It would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, there’s no doubt,” says Jorge Piñón, a lean Cuban who studies energy relations between the island and Venezuela at the University of Texas at Austin. Caracas has been vital for the Cuban economy since 1999, when Hugo Chavez came to power, describing the two socialist countries as bound together “by a sea of happiness.”
The very close cooperation involved Cuba sending doctors, sports coaches, and counter-intelligence agents to flush out the enemies of ‘Chavismo’, and in return, Venezuela sent 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day, which has now dropped to 30,000.
Meanwhile, Cuban agents remain active in Venezuela protecting Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s heir who trained in Cuba as a young man, ensuring he is always surrounded by trusted agents and collaborators, and banning all types of cell phones or other electronic devices. “They take very good care of Maduro and his immediate successors; the Cubans will not leave quietly,” says Thomas A. Shannon Jr., a former U.S. diplomat who had frequent contact with the Venezuelan regime.
