Cuba Threats
Jan. 12, 2026
U.S. President Donald Trump told Cuba — in the throws of an economic crisis now made more critical by the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan oil that served as a tenuous lifeline for the island — to “make a deal” or face unspecified consequences, adding on social media that no more Venezuelan oil or money would flow to the island. He provided no details about what form such a deal could take, reports the Guardian.
Also yesterday Trump reposted a message suggesting the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, whose parents were Cuban immigrants, could become the country’s new president, adding: “Sounds good to me!”
Hours later, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, responded on X by saying “those who turn everything into a business, even human lives, have no moral authority to point the finger at Cuba in any way, absolutely in any way.” (Associated Press)
Díaz-Canel also wrote that for “relations between the U.S. and Cuba to progress, they must be based on international law rather than hostility, threats, and economic coercion.” (Associated Press)
Yesterday Trump told reporters that the U.S. was “talking to Cuba.” He did not specify what had been discussed but said “You’ll find out pretty soon.” But Díaz-Canel said today there are no talks with the U.S. government, reports Reuters.
It is unclear what Trump meant by a deal and the White House did not respond to a request for comment, notes the New York Times.
The threats come as Cuba faces a mass exodus in the midst of general economic collapse. Cuba faces its gravest economic crisis since the 1959 revolution – worse than the “special period” between 1991 and 1995, after the fall of the Soviet Union, reports the Guardian.
After nearly 64 years of total economic embargo by the U.S., independent demographic studies suggest that Cuba is going through the world’s fastest population decline and is probably already below 8 million – a 25 percent drop in just four years.
Experts say a sudden halt in Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba could lead to widespread social unrest and further mass migration, reports the Associated Press.
Venezuelan Oil
Caracas and Washington are working on a $2 billion deal to supply up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil to the U.S., with proceeds to be deposited in U.S. Treasury-supervised accounts – a test of relations between Trump and Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, reports the Guardian.
Trump said he might block ExxonMobil from investing in Venezuela after the oil company’s chief executive called the country “uninvestable” during a White House meeting with oil executives on Friday.
Trump had urged the group to spend $100 billion to revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods responded that Venezuela would need to change its laws before it could be an attractive investment opportunity. (Guardian)
Woods said “We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here.”
Trump said on Friday that his administration would decide which firms would be allowed to operate in the South American country. “You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all,” he said. “We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela.”
Another firm at the meeting, ConocoPhillips, is still owed almost $9 billion in Venezuela, as a result of its assets being expropriated there. But Trump told the firms that are owed money that they will not get any special consideration in dealmaking.
“The exchange underscored how the industry is struggling to chart a course that will please the president without spending recklessly on risky drilling ventures,” according to the Washington Post.
But other investors are excited, saying “the economic opportunity for American firms in Venezuela could be the greatest windfall since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” reports the Washington Post.
“Hedge funds and other investment firms, already boosted by a sharp rally in Venezuelan debt, are mapping out trips to Caracas to scope out on-the-ground opportunities. Some are investigating niche instruments, like arbitration claims and unpaid state debts,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
More Venezuela
At least 24 political prisoners were released from Venezuelan prisons early today, according to the human rights group Foro Penal. After the interim government announced a prison release last week, 40 people have been freed “in a process unfolding amid complaints about the slowness and lack of transparency,” reports the Miami Herald.
Venezuela’s government said today that 116 prisoners have been released “in the past few hours,” according to a statement from the Penitentiary Services Ministry. (Reuters)
Boris Muñoz points to the lack of significant public celebration after Maduro’s removal in a Time op-ed. “Venezuelans are exhausted after 26 years of Chavismo. Understandably, many are willing to accept American tutelage as the price to pay. The most realistic assumption is that Venezuela will become, for an indefinite period, a U.S. protectorate, with varying degrees of what some see as an unwanted dependency. The worst version of that scenario is the current one: an alliance between Trump’s right-wing populism and Chavismo’s left-wing populism, with no clear path to democracy. Trump has expressed his satisfaction with how Rodriguez is collaborating with his Administration. The irony is evident: the extreme right and the far left united, will never be defeated.”
On Friday Rodríguez, enlisted U.S. military support to return an oil tanker that left the country without permission, reports the New York Times. It is “the first publicly known instance of military cooperation between the countries since” Maduro’s capture, and a sign that Rodríguez is seeking to impose on other factions of the ruling coalition. The tanker was carrying half a million barrels of oil belonging to a company controlled by a businessman called Alex Saab, according to internal PDVSA data and the people close to the industry.
Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, is a pedigreed leftist, but also an internationally-educated technocrat credited with pulling the country’s economy out of freefall — New York Times.
In a security alert sent out on Saturday, the U.S. State Department said there were reports of Chavista paramilitary groups, known as colectivos, setting up roadblocks and searching cars for evidence that the occupants were U.S. citizens or supporters. (Guardian)
The patrols respond to Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and could respond to a powerplay between him, the Rodríguez siblings and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, notes James Bosworth in the Latin America Risk Report.
Despite months of warnings, Venezuela’s military appears to have been unprepared for the U.S. attack to capture Maduro on Jan. 3. “The Venezuelan military’s incompetence appears to have played a big role in the U.S. success. Venezuela’s much-touted antiaircraft systems were essentially not connected when U.S. forces entered the skies over Venezuela’s capital, and they may not have been working for years,” reports the New York Times.
Pope Leo XIV met with Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado in a private audience at the Vatican today. (Associated Press)
U.S. intervention in Venezuela is risky: “The plausible paths of failure include a partial transition that leaves criminal networks intact, a prolonged period of political limbo that sustains migration and instability, or a creeping security commitment that the United States never intended but finds difficult to unwind,” wrote Juan González in Foreign Affairs last week. “What happens next will determine whether this moment becomes a hinge in hemispheric history or another entry in the long catalogue of American overreach.”
More Donroe Doctrine
Mexican “President Claudia Sheinbaum and her inner circle have been grappling with the right tone to strike in the country’s response to the Venezuela strike for fear of antagonizing the White House,” reports the New York Times.
Indeed, reactions across the region to the strike — while divided by each government’s ideology — “show how an increasingly aggressive Trump administration is scrambling the politics of Latin America. While their public responses may be different, they all appear to share a common goal in a new era of U.S. interventionism: self-preservation,” reports the New York Times.
A covert Russian influence operation “has been saturating U.S.-focused information ecosystems with a chaotic stream of often contradictory narratives and conspiracy theories about Maduro’s capture using a network of social media accounts, influencers and fake websites, according to research from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.” - Washington Post
Colombia
The Guardian on how Colombian President Gustavo Petro defused a growing conflict with Trump — and why he’s not the next Maduro.
Nonetheless, the road ahead for Colombia-U.S. relations remains challenging — and could be a major factor in Colombia’s election season, writes Ricardo Ávila in Americas Quarterly.
Nicaragua
Nicaragua’s Interior Ministry said Saturday the country would release dozens of prisoners, in response to ramped up pressure from the U.S. It wasn’t immediately clear who was freed and under what conditions, reports the Associated Press.
In parallel, Nicaraguan authorities have arrested at least 60 people for reportedly celebrating or expressing support for Maduro’s capture. A human rights group said 49 people remained in detention Friday, arrests based solely on expressions of opinion: comments on social media, private celebrations, or not repeating official propaganda. (Guardian)
Regional Relations
The EU has reached a free trade agreement with the Mercosur, 25 years after talks began and despite opposition from farmers in several European countries. Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hailed it as a “historic day for multilateralism” after the four South American countries put the final touches to the deal in Brussels, reports the BBC.
Trinidad and Tobago’s wholesale support for Trump’s Venezuela intervention was a mistake, argues Kenneth Mohammed in the Guardian: “Trinidad and Tobago now faces an openly hostile neighbour whose senior leadership has denounced the dual island state’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, as a complicit enabler of US aggression and designated her persona non grata.”
Regional
Historian Ernesto Semán reads Greg Grandin’s America América as a monumental rethinking of hemispheric history, arguing that Latin America has long functioned as the United States’ immanent critic—exposing, generation after generation, the gap between US ideals and US power. In an Ideas Letter essay he shows how Grandin reconstructs the Americas as a single, entangled political space, in which Latin America’s experiments with radical democracy repeatedly challenged and reshaped liberalism in the US, even as they were violently quashed by the hegemon itself.
Ten years after Fidel Castro died, is this the year his era finally ends, asks Brian Winter in Americas Quarterly. Even before Maduro’s capture la week ago ”the political and economic model pioneered by Castro showed signs of being in its death throes. … The repressive, confiscatory, aggressively anti-capitalist brand of leftism practiced by Cuba and Venezuela has never been so unpopular throughout Latin America—not primarily because of Donald Trump’s actions, but because its own failures have never been so publicly visible.”
Honduras
The murder of renowned Indigenous activist and environmental defender Berta Cáceres in Honduras in 2016 was an organized criminal operation funded by money from two international development banks that was diverted away from a controversial extractive project to pay for illegal activities and murder, according to a new report by an independent group of experts tasked by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights - InSight Crime
Argentina
Raging wildfires in the Argentine Patagonia have blazed through nearly 12,000 hectares of scrubland and planted and native forests, threatening local communities, reports the Associated Press.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said his risky US gamble on Argentina’s currency has paid off. Bessent said U.S. financial support had been repaid and the US no longer held any Argentine pesos in its exchange stabilization fund - BBC
Culture Corner
Costa Rican director Nicole Chi Amén embarks on a journey to learn more about her own mixed cultural heritage after the death of her Guangdong-born grandma in her documentary Guián - Guardian
Wagner Moura, the Brazilian star of “The Secret Agent,” is a major Oscar contender, though some at home turned against him for criticizing the right-wing government of former president Jair Bolsonaro, reports the New York Times.
“Journalist Paulo Antonio Paranaguá uses images from the turbulent continent to weave a history of the region, covering colonisation, slavery and dictatorship,” reports the Guardian.