Cuba Ready to Accept Outside Investment, Top Official Says

President Trump’s words came amid a nationwide blackout and as a top Cuban official said his country would move to open the economy to foreign investors.

President Trump raised the possibility of the United States “taking” Cuba on Monday, telling reporters at the White House, “I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba.”

“Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it,” he said. “They’re a very weakened nation right now.”

The president’s words came on the same day as Cuba experienced a nationwide blackout, amid diminishing fuel supplies. On Monday evening, Cuban officials had also planned to announce that the country’s Communist government would open itself to foreign investment, including from the United States, Cuba’s deputy prime minister, Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, told NBC News.

“Cuba is open to having a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies, also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants,” the deputy prime minister said in a clip of an interview posted by the network on Monday morning.

It is unclear how widely Cuba intends to open its economy, or how the moves compare with those made a decade ago under President Barack Obama. But the scheduled announcement coincides with a severe humanitarian and energy crisis, with some experts saying the island could run out of fuel within weeks because of a de facto blockade by the Trump administration.

For the past three months, the United States has choked off Cuba’s access to foreign oil, blocking shipments from Venezuela and elsewhere. Frequent blackouts have followed — including the broad power outage on Monday — and hospitals have had to postpone some procedures, deepening a humanitarian crisis that has also involved food shortages and has led to rare protests on the island.

Officials had planned to announce the economic changes on an evening television program, Mesa Redonda, or Round Table. The program was not broadcast at the scheduled hour. It was not immediately clear if that was the result of power outages.

The Obama administration had opened up business opportunities for American investors in the Cuban private sector, but the Cuban bureaucracy was unable to rapidly adapt and the Trump administration rescinded Mr. Obama’s measures.

Mr. Pérez-Oliva Fraga, who also serves as Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment, also said the Cuban government would open the economy to investments beyond the private sector. “This goes beyond the commercial realm,” he said. “It also applies to investments, not only to small ones, but also to large ones, especially in infrastructure.”

But because of the decades-long U.S. embargo, Cuba is not easily able to attract American capital, Mr. Pérez-Oliva Fraga said.

A person close to the recent negotiations said that the Trump administration was waiting to see whether the changes to be announced on Monday would be truly structural and meaningful — not simply cosmetic — before deciding whether to issue licenses that would allow such investments. The person asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive diplomatic matters.

Carlos A Giménez, a Republican congressman from Florida who is Cuban American, said on X on Friday, in Spanish, “There will be ZERO investment from the US unless there is MAJOR political change on the island.”

As U.S. and Cuban officials negotiate over the future of the Communist-ruled island, the Trump administration is said to be seeking to push President Miguel Díaz-Canel from power, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The Trump administration has warned that if Cuba does not cooperate, it could face a fate similar to that of Venezuela. In January, the U.S. military captured the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, after he refused to step down.

Last week, President Díaz-Canel acknowledged in a televised appearance that his government was engaged in talks with Trump administration officials to resolve the standoff.

In his 90-minute appearance, Mr. Díaz-Canel said that a decision to be announced on Monday would “greatly facilitate” the participation of Cubans abroad in the island’s “economic and social development program.”

Demographers estimate that more than two million Cubans have left the country in the past five years. In his remarks, Mr. Díaz-Canel said, “It is our responsibility as the government to embrace them, listen to them, tend to them and offer them a space to participate in the economic and social development.”

Some Cuban exiles in Florida and elsewhere have for years pushed for the Cuban government to allow Cubans overseas to invest in the nation’s economy.

Cuban officials have signaled to some Cuban Americans that Monday’s announcement will involve allowing exiles to return to the island freely and to run a type of enterprise that was legally recognized by the government in 2021. Those entities are allowed to import goods, provide services, and create jobs, and they have quickly become critical to the Cuban economy. Private supermarkets, for instance, have higher prices than state-run stores but carry a far broader selection of food.

For more outsiders to enter and run businesses in Cuba, the U.S. government would have to ease restrictions on traveling and doing business on the island.

Hugo Cancio, a Cuban American in Miami, has been running perhaps the most visible U.S.-owned business in Cuba for years. His e-commerce platform, Katapulk, has become a sort of Cuban Amazon, allowing Cubans abroad to order and ship goods to their friends and relatives still in Cuba.

Mr. Cancio built Katapulk as a U.S.-based entity with a special license to form partnerships with businesses in Cuba, which deliver the goods on the ground. But that structure has been complicated, and U.S. government restrictions have at times hamstrung operations, he said.

If the Cuban government allows Cuban Americans to own businesses in Cuba, they could function as a bridge to Washington, Mr. Cancio said.

“As the Cuban authorities recognize our rights to be part of the Cuban nation, to participate in the economic transformation and the potential political reforms of the future, we will be the ones that will change Washington,” he said. Exiles, he said, could push Congress and Trump administration officials to lift sanctions.

“We will be the ones that will talk to Washington and say, ‘Our country now recognizes us, and we want to be part of that transformation,’” Mr. Cancio said.

David C. Adams, David E. Sanger, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Ed Augustin contributed reporting.

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