Trump Claims 'Having the Honor of Taking Cuba' Amid Oil Shortages and Nationwide Blackouts

Cuba's military is actively preparing for the possibility of US aggression, Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said on Sunday, as President Donald Trump repeated his intention to 'take' the Caribbean island now crippled by three nationwide blackouts in a single month.

Trump's 'Honour' and Cuba's Response

'I do believe I will be having the honour of taking Cuba,' Trump told reporters at the White House last week, adding that, 'I could do anything I want with it.' When pressed on whether a military operation would resemble the January capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or the ongoing conflict with Iran, Trump said he couldn't specify.

Fernández de Cossío responded directly on NBC's 'Meet the Press'. 'Our military is always prepared, and in fact it is preparing these days for the possibility of military aggression,' he said. 'We would be naive not to prepare,' he added, 'looking at what's happening around the world.'

The deputy foreign minister insisted Cuba would not negotiate on regime change. 'Cuba is a sovereign country and has the right to be a sovereign country,' he said. 'That is something that no sovereign country negotiates.'

An Island Running on Fumes

Saturday's total grid failure, the third complete shutdown this month, was triggered by a sudden unit breakdown at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey province. The cascading collapse left roughly 10 million people without power. By Sunday morning, only 72,000 customers in Havana, including five hospitals, had electricity restored.

No foreign oil has reached the island since 9 January. Vice Minister of Energy and Mines Argelio Abad Vigo confirmed this week that Cuba has gone three months without any supplies of diesel, fuel oil, gasoline, aviation fuel, or liquefied petroleum gas. The country produces just 40% of the fuel its economy requires.

Even before Saturday's shutdown, residents in the capital were losing electricity for as long as 15 hours a day. Rural areas fare worse. Surgeries have been postponed at hospitals across the island, food rots in powerless refrigerators, and airlines have slashed flights to Cuba as the tourism sector collapses.

'You can't live like this,' Nilo Lopez, a 36-year-old taxi driver in Havana, told AFP.

Venezuela, Sanctions, and the Pressure Campaign

The energy crisis deepened after the US military captured Maduro in January, severing Venezuela's oil shipments to Cuba. Trump then threatened tariffs on any nation that exports fuel to Havana, claiming the island posed an 'extraordinary threat' by hosting military and intelligence capabilities of 'hostile countries'.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents emigrated from Cuba, has pushed for leadership change on the island. 'Their economy doesn't work,' Rubio told reporters at the White House. 'The people in charge don't know how to fix it, so they have to get new people in charge.'

Rubio's team has reportedly met with Raúl Castro's grandson, Colonel Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, in what US officials have framed as outreach to a new generation of potential reformists.

Invasion Talk Meets Pentagon Denial

Despite Trump's rhetoric, General Francis Donovan, head of US Southern Command, told the Senate on Thursday that the military is not rehearsing an invasion or preparing to seize Cuba. Asked directly whether any US command was conducting such exercises, Donovan replied simply, 'No.'

Still, he confirmed US forces would defend the embassy in Havana and the naval base at Guantánamo Bay if a physical threat emerged, and left open the possibility of setting up a migrant processing camp there if Cuba's government fell.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned last week that any attempt at forced regime change would encounter 'impregnable resistance'.

For now, 10 million Cubans sit in the dark, caught between a broken grid and a geopolitical standoff that shows no sign of cooling.