Cuba Offers Dialogue as U.S. Oil Pressure Pushes Relations to the Brink

In a room where every adjective can become a diplomatic incident, Cuba says it is open to ‘meaningful’ dialogue with the United States, signaling a genuine willingness to engage, while rejecting any talk of changing its system. Washington’s renewed pressure, tied to oil, turns an old standoff into an immediate test.

A Conversation That Starts With a Boundary

The micro scene is not a summit table or a ribbon-cutting. It is something smaller, almost clerical, the kind of moment that reveals how foreign policy is actually made. A senior Cuban diplomat chooses his verbs, pauses, then chooses them again, because the trouble is that the first sentence sets the limits for everything that follows. The air feels conditioned and still. Paper sits in tidy stacks. Somewhere nearby, a phone waits for the following message.

That is the atmosphere in which Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, sketched what Havana says it wants and what it says it will not entertain. Cuba is ready for “meaningful” dialogue with the United States, but not for negotiations over its political model, which underscores its resilience and clarity in defending its core principles.

“We’re not ready to discuss our constitutional system as we suppose the US is not ready to discuss their constitutional system, their political system, their economic reality,” he told EFE.

In one line, he tried to make the relationship symmetrical: each country, in its own frame, considers its system nonnegotiable. The wager here is that symmetry, even rhetorical symmetry, can keep dialogue alive when power is uneven. But it also signals how narrow the runway is. If Washington’s opening demand is political transformation, and Havana’s opening response is that the system is off the table, then the following steps shrink to mechanics, messages, and pressure.

Fernández de Cossío said the countries have not yet established ‘a bilateral dialogue.’ However, they have had ‘some exchanges of messages,’ such as unofficial contacts or backchannel communications, linked to the highest levels of Cuba’s government. That detail matters because it hints at a channel that exists without being named, the kind of contact that can be expanded quickly or cut off quickly, depending on the temperature of the week.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel echoed the core idea on Thursday, saying dialogue under pressure is impossible. It was a straightforward statement, not a bargaining flourish. The point was less to slam a door than to describe the condition of the room: if the conversation is held with a hand on the handle, it does not feel like conversation.

Oil Pressure Turns Diplomacy into Daily Arithmetic

The backdrop to all of this is not abstract. It is fuel, and therefore electricity, transport, and the basic arithmetic of a country that, in these notes, is described as heading into an extreme situation after losing Venezuelan oil.

Days before Fernández de Cossío spoke, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States “would love to see” regime change in Cuba, though it would not necessarily act on it. It was one of those sentences that lands heavily even when it arrives as a preference rather than a plan, because preference can become policy with a signature.

At the same time, the Trump administration has ramped up pressure by trying to cut off oil deliveries to the island. The United States has already disrupted Cuba’s oil supplies from Venezuela after removing that country’s president from power, and the notes place the new escalation in the immediate aftermath. In January 2026, after the capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba ceased immediately. Trump warned Havana that it was “about to fall,” and weeks later, the White House signed an executive order threatening tariffs on countries that directly or indirectly sell or supply crude to Havana.

The administration’s stated justification is sweeping, calling Havana an “extraordinary threat” because it aligns with “hostile countries and malign actors,” and hosts their military and intelligence capabilities. What this does is pull the dispute away from the narrow question of energy and into the broader language of national security, where compromise becomes more complex to sell and more challenging to stage.

The notes, in Spanish, describe the current moment as the most tense in decades, highlighting the severity of the situation. Relations between Havana and Washington, enemies since the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, are living their most strained period in a generation. The climate of sharpness intensified after Maduro’s capture, and the island’s vulnerability deepened when the oil stopped.

This is why the Cuban offer of dialogue is paired, almost immediately, with a refusal to debate regime design. Havana is signaling that it will talk, but only on terrain where it believes it can survive the conversation. Washington is signaling that it is willing to tighten material constraints to force political outcomes. The two signals do not align. They cross.

One memorable line keeps returning as you read these notes: “History is not a backdrop here; it is a lever.”

A Long History That Keeps Reappearing in the Present Tense

The timeline embedded in the notes reads like a condensed biography of a feud, with moments of rupture that never quite end and moments of thaw that never quite settle.

In January 1959, Fidel Castro’s armed rebellion toppled Fulgencio Batista, who fled Cuba. Washington recognized the new revolutionary government, but clashes followed reforms and the expropriation of U.S. companies. In March 1960, the French cargo ship La Coubre exploded in Havana’s port, killing about 100, and Castro blamed the United States, using “Patria o muerte” for the first time. By October 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower banned exports to Cuba, the seed of the embargo. In January 1961, the United States broke diplomatic relations and closed its embassy in Havana. In April 1961, a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles landed at Playa Girón to overthrow Castro and failed. In February 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed the executive order establishing the embargo. In October 1962, the world approached nuclear war when the United States discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba, ending after 13 days when Nikita Khrushchev withdrew the missiles in exchange for U.S. moves in Turkey.

Then come the later chapters, where violence, migration, and law tangle together. In October 1976, Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 exploded near Barbados, killing 73. Under Jimmy Carter, in September 1977, there was a brief thaw, and interest sections opened in Washington and Havana. In April 1980, after a group of Cubans stormed Peru’s embassy in Havana seeking asylum, Castro opened Mariel, and nearly 125,000 people left for Florida. In 1992 and 1996, the United States hardened sanctions through the Torricelli Act and the Helms-Burton Act, tightening the legal architecture of the embargo. In August 1994, after a protest on Havana’s malecón, Cuba allowed another mass departure, leading to bilateral agreements in which Washington committed to 20,000 visas annually and established the “wet foot, dry foot” policy. In 1996, Cuba shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes in international waters, killing four. In September 1997, hotel explosions struck Cuba, later linked to exile groups in Florida through investigations and a New York Times interview with Luis Posada Carriles. In 1998, Cuba infiltrated spies into Florida, and the FBI arrested 10 people, with five receiving long sentences, while Cuba said the wasp network aimed to prevent terrorism. In 1999, the custody dispute over Elián González became a political symbol and another collision.

There was another formal thaw in December 2014, when Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced normalization, exchanged prisoners, including Alan Gross and members of the Wasp network, and restored direct communication, followed by the reopening of embassies in July 2015. By August 2017, Donald Trump tightened restrictions after reports of supposed sonic attacks on U.S. diplomatic personnel. In January 2021, Trump put Cuba back on the state sponsors of terrorism list at the end of his first term. The notes say Joe Biden briefly removed Cuba from the list, but Trump, now in his second term, returned it.

That is the inheritance behind Fernández de Cossío’s careful sentence and Díaz-Canel’s flat refusal to negotiate under pressure. It is also why the latest oil-centered measures land with such force. They touch a country’s supply line and also feel its memory, which has been trained for decades to read pressure as a prelude.

So the question is not whether Cuba and the United States can speak to each other. They are already exchanging messages. The question is whether either side will treat dialogue as a tool for coexistence or as a corridor toward surrender. In these notes, both governments are telling you, in different ways, that they think they already know the answer.

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