Trump touts US has ‘tremendous’ amount of Venezuelan oil, vows to ‘take care’ of Cuba after Iran focus
President Donald Trump declared Saturday that the U.S. is “taking out tremendous amounts of oil” from Venezuela while vowing to “take care” of Cuba’s regime following America’s focus on Iran.
The president, speaking at the Shield of the Americas Summit in Florida, prefaced his remarks by saying that since the January operation to capture former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, the administration has “been working closely with the new president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez,” and, “she’s doing a great job working with us.”
“And we’re taking out tremendous amounts of oil. They’re making more money now than they’ve ever made, ever made. We have the big oil companies in. They are making more money, we’re getting some,” Trump said. “They’re getting a lot. They’re making more money now than they’ve ever made in the history of their country.”
“And I’m pleased to say that this week we have formally recognized the Venezuelan government. We’ve actually legally recognized them. We have also just reached a historic gold deal that’s called the gold deal with Venezuela, to allow our two countries to work together to facilitate the sale of Venezuelan gold and other minerals,” Trump continued, describing a license issued by the Treasury Department Friday that prohibits people and companies from Iran, North Korea, Russia and Cuba from doing business with Minerven — Venezuela’s state-owned gold mining company — among other measures.
US RESTORES DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH VENEZUELA AMID PUSH FOR DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION
“As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we’re also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba. Cuba’s at the end of the line,” Trump also said. “They’re very much at the end of the line. They have no money, they have no oil. They have a bad philosophy. They have a bad regime that’s been bad for a long time. And they used to get the money from Venezuela. They get the oil from Venezuela, but they don’t have any money from Venezuela. They don’t have any oil,” Trump added.
Trump in January had declared a national emergency via an executive order over Cuba, accusing the communist regime of aligning with hostile foreign powers and terrorist groups while moving to punish countries that supply the island nation with oil.
MILLONS LOSE POWER ACROSS CUBA AS TRUMP SANCTIONS CONTINUE TO FUEL ONGOING ENERGY CRISIS
Trump said Saturday that Cuba is “negotiating with [Secretary of State] Marco [Rubio] and myself and some others. And I would think a deal would be made very easily with Cuba.”
“But Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was. It’ll have a great new life, but it’s in its last moments of life, the way it is,” the president added.
The State Department described the Shield of the Americas Summit in Doral as a gathering of the “strongest likeminded allies in our hemisphere to promote freedom, security, and prosperity in our region.”
Trump said America’s “focus right now is on Iran,” but “many of you have come today, and they say, ‘I hope you can take care of Cuba because you’ve had problems with Cuba, right? You mentioned.”
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“I was surprised, but four of you said, actually, ‘Could you do us a favor? Take care of Cuba.’ I’ll take care of it, okay?” Trump said, garnering applause.
NPR reporter stunned by Venezuela visit, locals say ‘a weight has been lifted’ after Maduro’s removal
NPR correspondent Eyder Peralta was amazed during a segment Friday by his recent trip to Venezuela following President Donald Trump‘s arrest of the country’s president Nicolás Maduro.
“It is absolutely surreal because you land at the airport and the signs are in Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, which tells you just where this country was facing a few months ago,” Peralta told host Steve Inskeep. “And then you go out on the streets and people here tell you that they feel like a weight has been lifted.”
He continued, “For the first time in a long time, there are street protests. Opposition groups are holding public meetings. I was at the justice department building yesterday, and there was a group of protesters calling for all political prisoners to be released.”
US RESTORES DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH VENEZUELA AMID PUSH FOR DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION
Peralta recalled his encounter with Edward Ocariz, a former political prisoner who Peralta said had “faced the wrath of this government.”
“But then, right there in public, he taunted the government. They call us traitors, he said, but look at them now,” Peralta said. “‘Now it’s them who are not only kneeling,’ he’s saying, ‘but sleeping with the United States.’ And to be clear, he thinks the U.S. intervention was regrettable, but he also thinks that something good came out of it, and that allows him to say this in public without being thrown back in prison.”
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The NPR reporter went on to say he observed “lots of smiles” during Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s visit, who was brokering a deal with the interim Venezuelan government, eyeing minerals that the U.S. once depended on China for.
“And those are the minerals in your laptop, for example, and he says Venezuela likely has those minerals,” Peralta said. “American companies would like to extract them, and Venezuela could suddenly become key in helping the U.S. break reliance on China — a win-win, he called it. And yesterday, Trump said, quote, ‘Venezuela is working.’ Once again, he was framing it as the model for regime change.”
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The Trump administration shocked the world in January when it extracted Maduro and his wife in an overnight operation in order to bring them to justice in the U.S. for criminal charges filed against them in 2020.
The State Department announced Thursday the U.S. is reestablishing “diplomatic and consular relations” with the interim Venezuelan government.
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US restores diplomatic relations with Venezuela amid push for democratic transition
The United States and Venezuela’s interim authorities have agreed to reestablish diplomatic and consular relations, according to a State Department media note issued Thursday.
“The United States and Venezuela’s interim authorities have agreed to reestablish diplomatic and consular relations,” the State Department said in a statement released March 5.
The State Department said the agreement is intended to “facilitate our joint efforts to promote stability, support economic recovery and advance political reconciliation in Venezuela.
“Our engagement is focused on helping the Venezuelan people move forward through a phased process that creates the conditions for a peaceful transition to a democratically elected government.”
CIA DIRECTOR WAS IN VENEZUELA TO MEET WITH ACTING PRESIDENT DELCY RODRIGUEZ, OFFICIAL SAYS
The announcement confirms the restoration of diplomatic and consular relations between the two governments. The State Department did not specify when embassy operations or visa services may resume.
The statement also did not address potential sanctions changes, outline migration or security cooperation measures or provide additional details about diplomatic engagement moving forward.
The announcement comes after months of U.S. engagement in Venezuela.
MILLIONS LOSE POWER ACROSS CUBA AS TRUMP SANCTIONS CONTINUE TO FUEL ONGOING ENERGY CRISIS
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum traveled to Caracas March 4 and held meetings with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez during a two-day visit, U.S. and Venezuelan officials said.
Burgum discussed opportunities related to mining and critical minerals supply chains and said the Venezuelan interim government had offered security assurances for foreign mining companies seeking to invest in the country.
U.S. forces captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Jan. 3 in Caracas. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, pleaded not guilty two days later in federal court in New York to charges including narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy and weapons-related offenses.
Diplomatic and consular relations typically involve government-to-government engagement as well as the operation of embassies and consulates that facilitate visas, citizen services and diplomatic coordination.
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“The United States remains committed to supporting the Venezuelan people and working with partners across the region to advance stability and prosperity,” the statement said.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Trump is realigning world energy markets and the Iran strikes are actually helping
Iran’s tyrannical and ruthless regime is disintegrating. After yet again massacring thousands of its own citizens for voicing their dreams for liberty and better governance, the Iranian regime, meanwhile, resumed pursuing nuclear capability and its aggressive ICBM program. The regime’s overconfidence in U.S. inaction cost it its leader, and its core military capabilities are going up in smoke. Against this backdrop, the conflict has spread to the Gulf, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum, and forcing the rest of the world to rethink how it prices energy risk and political alignment.
This is not another regional flare-up. This is a rupture of an old equilibrium in which sanctioned oil, shadow fleets and calibrated escalation kept markets stable enough to function. That equilibrium is now breaking. A rapid political-military shift in the Middle East is unfolding alongside a restructuring of the global energy order.
When I was in Afghanistan during the surge, Tehran’s active support for the insurgency fighting the United States and Afghan forces fomented instability and amplified violence for which civilians paid the biggest price, a dynamic that so many across several nations have tragically encountered for decades. But Iran was never a contained regional problem.
While its terrorism was widely perceived as a Middle East issue, its cyber and intelligence operations spanned continents, with assassination plots that included the American president. As to global effects, Iran’s energy has always made its regime globally significant.
GAS PRICES COULD JUMP AS MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS THREATEN GLOBAL OIL SUPPLY
At this stage of the conflict, the most economically significant and immediate geography is the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran is working to choke off. Roughly one-fifth of global petroleum and a substantial portion of liquefied natural gas move through that narrow corridor. As strikes intensified, vessels paused transit, insurers reassessed exposure and operators rerouted cargoes. Markets adjusted immediately. Energy security and geopolitical stability are now inseparable; maritime risk has become the pressure valve through which regional conflict spills into global consequence.
This realignment did not begin in the Gulf this weekend. It started with U.S. actions in Venezuela. Caracas holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves — about 303 billion barrels — and even marginal normalization under a more U.S.-cooperative government alters the supply calculus for Washington and its allies.
The new U.S.–Venezuela arrangement has already generated roughly $2 billion in transactions in just weeks, pulling Venezuelan barrels back into wider circulation and altering the discount ecosystem Moscow had grown accustomed to. Stack that with a post-crisis Iran re-entering markets on different terms, and the shadow ecosystem of discounted, sanctioned crude — Russia, Iran, Venezuela — begins to fracture and reprice simultaneously.
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But the most consequential energy recalibration runs through Beijing. China is essentially Iran’s oil export market. In 2025, China bought more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil, averaging ~1.38 million barrels per day (bpd), about 13.4% of China’s seaborne crude imports — meaning Beijing is simultaneously Tehran’s economic lifeline and its strategic choke chain.
By turning a sanctioned producer into a quasi-captive supply relationship — sustained through gray-market routing, reflagging and intermediary hubs — Beijing secured discounted barrels in normal times and leverage in crisis. Any sustained disruption of Iranian flows forces China into replacement buying that tightens global markets and exposes China’s own energy security; Iran exports about 1.6 million bpd mainly to China and such disruptions pushes Beijing to pivot to alternatives.
The relationship is therefore best understood as a dependency loop: Iran needs China for revenue and sanctions relief-by-proxy; China uses Iran as a discount supplier and as a pressure valve in the sanctioned crude system — one that can be tightened or loosened depending on Beijing’s broader negotiation posture with Washington and its appetite for risk in the Gulf. That Iran-China dependency is no longer stable. With Iranian oil flows disrupted, China faces a choice between turning to alternative suppliers at higher cost or even tapping strategic reserves. Tightening global crude markets resulting from U.S. actions in Venezuela and now Iran give Washington leverage in energy pricing.
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Beyond the tanker decks, this shift underscores the larger theme of reconfiguration: resources once bundled to manage sanctions are now subject to heightened geopolitical risk, forcing China to rethink dependencies while the U.S. and its partners are positioning to shape the post-conflict energy order. Energy supply patterns will restructure global power relations. And where China is recalibrating exposure, Russia is recalculating opportunity.
The same forces reshaping China’s calculations are altering Moscow’s. As India trims Russian purchases, Moscow has been pushing more barrels into China, and Reuters reports China’s Russian crude imports hitting new records in February while Russian sellers widened discounts to keep demand — Urals trading roughly $9–$11 below Brent for China deliveries, and other Russian grades also cutting hard as sellers chase Chinese refiners.
The new U.S.–Venezuela arrangement has already generated roughly $2 billion in transactions in just weeks, pulling Venezuelan barrels back into wider circulation and altering the discount ecosystem Moscow had grown accustomed to.
This matters because China is also the anchor buyer for sanctioned Iranian crude; the “discount market” is not infinite, so Russia and Iran are now competing for the same limited pool of Chinese buyers, driving deeper concessions and leaving cargoes idling — exactly the kind of sanctions-economy dynamic.
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Add the West’s tightening focus on Russia’s “shadow fleet” and the risk of seizures or insurance denial, and you get an energy chessboard where coercion moves from rhetoric to logistics: who can ship, insure and clear payments reliably becomes as strategic as who can produce.
In that context, Russia’s loud warnings about Hormuz disruption are not just diplomacy, they are a reminder that Moscow profits from volatility, but also needs a functioning gray-market channel to China, and Iran’s crisis threatens to scramble the very discount ecosystem Russia has used to finance its war in Ukraine. Structural realignment threatens the very gray-market architecture on which Moscow has relied.
Energy is only one layer of a global shift. Strategic minerals remain critical. The Trump administration has increased economic and maritime pressure on Cuba, tightening an effective oil blockade that choked off fuel imports. President Donald Trump has authorized tariffs targeting countries supplying oil to Havana.
This is not simply punitive policy. It reflects a broader strategic doctrine: deny adversarial regimes energy lifelines while repositioning the Western Hemisphere’s resource base toward U.S. leverage. Oil is only one domain. Rare earth elements are a strategic asset. Cuba’s nickel and cobalt output, combined with China’s tightening grip through rare-earth export controls indicates that leverage is not just oil fields but also supply chains. America achieving rare earth elements sovereignty will remain a strategic goal and such a global realignment on this front is much needed.
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By the close of the first weekend, Iran appeared intent on accelerating its own collapse by compounding strategic error with strategic error. Iran felt it wise to respond to U.S. and Israeli strikes by pushing a half dozen other nations against it. On Saturday afternoon, Feb. 28, Iran launched attacks on seven sovereign nations – Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan and Israel. It added Oman shortly after.
These nations now have a legal and political basis to deepen security ties with the U.S. and Israel that they could never have justified domestically before today. Iran has arguably done more to consolidate the anti-Iran regional architecture in one afternoon than a decade of American diplomacy. Watch for accelerated Abraham Accords-adjacent normalization with Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks.
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Any sustained disruption of Iranian flows forces China into replacement buying that tightens global markets and exposes China’s own energy security…
After massacring thousands of its own citizens for demanding better governance, the regime’s long-standing presumption of U.S. inaction cost the 1979 Revolution its dream of ruling over Iranians perpetually. After 47 years, its leader is gone, and its core military capabilities are being dismantled.
The lesson is not simply that the Iranian regime is falling. It is that when it falls amid energy choke points and great-power competition, supply chains, alliances and leverage structures shift simultaneously. Iran’s collapse is not the end of the story; it is the catalyst for a broader redistribution of power across energy, alliances, and great-power leverage. America should exploit these shifting dynamics fully.
Millions lose power across Cuba as Trump sanctions continue to fuel ongoing energy crisis
A large-scale blackout struck western Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions without power in the latest outage to hit the island as it grapples with dwindling oil supplies due to sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump.
The U.S. Embassy in Cuba said that at approximately 12:41 p.m., there was a “disconnection of the national electrical grid resulting in a complete power outage” stretching from Camagüey to Pinar del Río, including the greater Havana metropolitan area.
“Cuba’s national electrical grid is increasingly unstable and prolonged scheduled and unscheduled power outages are a daily occurrence across the country to include Havana,” the embassy said.
“Outages affect water supply, lighting, refrigeration, and communications. Take precautions by conserving fuel, water, food, and mobile phone charge, and be prepared for significant disruption.”
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The incident was reportedly caused by an unexpected shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant, located roughly 62 miles east of Havana.
Local reports indicate the island may need at least three days to restore operations, according to The Associated Press.
Vicente de la O Levy, the minister of Energy and Mines of Cuba, added that “We are working on the restoration of the SEN amid a complex energy situation.”
At least one power plant, Felton 1, remains online, he said.
CUBA’S PRESIDENT DEFIANT, SAYS NO NEGOTIATIONS SCHEDULED AS TRUMP MOVES TO CHOKE OFF OIL LIFELINE
Reuters reported that, because Cuba is accustomed to frequent power outages caused by state-imposed energy rationing, some traffic lights and businesses remained operational thanks to solar panels or backup generators. Many residents have also installed solar panels on their homes and vehicles to maintain electricity amid soaring fuel prices, the outlet said.
Cuba has endured a string of widespread blackouts in recent years due to long-standing issues with its aging power infrastructure and chronic fuel shortages.
However, the situation worsened in January after a U.S. military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and halted Venezuelan oil exports, effectively choking off Cuba’s key source of fuel.
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Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel stated in January that, despite the U.S. severing Havana’s energy lifeline, his administration would not negotiate with Washington to establish a new agreement.
Trump administration blocks Venezuela from paying Maduro’s legal bills amid federal charges
The Trump administration has moved to block the Venezuelan government from covering the legal expenses of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as he fights federal drug trafficking and weapons charges in New York, according to a court filing from his attorney.
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, pleaded not guilty in federal court in New York on Jan. 5 to drug trafficking and weapons charges, days after American forces captured them at the presidential palace in Venezuela.
In a letter to U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is overseeing the case in the Southern District of New York, Maduro’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, said the U.S. was preventing the Venezuelan government from covering his client’s legal fees.
“The government of Venezuela has an obligation to pay Mr. Maduro’s fees. Mr. Maduro has a legitimate expectation that the government of Venezuela would do so, and Mr. Maduro cannot otherwise afford counsel,” Pollack wrote.
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In the letter, dated Feb. 20, Pollack argued that under “Venezuelan law and custom, the government of Venezuela pays the expenses of the President and First Lady.”
Pollack said that Maduro and the Venezuelan government were subjected to sanctions by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and his legal counsel would need to be granted a license to represent him and be paid.
While Pollack said OFAC granted licenses for both Maduro and Flores on Jan. 9, Maduro’s license was amended “without explanation” to not allow the Venezuelan government to pay for his defense costs.
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Flores’ license was not impacted, according to Pollack.
Pollack said that OFAC is “interfering with Mr. Maduro’s ability to retain counsel” and violating his Sixth Amendment right to counsel of his choice.
Maduro’s attorney said OFAC has not responded to his request to reinstate the original license and threatened to take legal action if it continued to do so.
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“If OFAC fails to act on the request to reinstate the original license, or denies that request, Mr. Maduro will file a formal motion in the coming days seeking relief from the Court,” he wrote.
The U.S. military conducted an operation to capture Maduro in Caracas on Jan. 3. He was flown to New York, where he is being held in a federal jail.
Maduro was charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
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Flores faces three charges: cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
Fox News Digital reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Treasury Department for comment.