President Donald Trump said Friday, “maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba,” and that his administration is in contact with the Cuban government.
Trump’s comments came during a press gaggle on the South Lawn during his departure from the White House for Corpus Christi, Texas.
“The Cuban Government is talking with us. They’re in a big deal of trouble, as you know. They have no money; they have no anything right now, but they’re talking with us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba. We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba,” he said.
“We have people living here that want to go back to Cuba, and they’re very happy with what’s going on,” he said.
Trump’s comments come days after the Cuban government announced it allegedly engaged a Florida-registered speed boat in a shootout, killing four people and detaining at least six more, as Breitbart News noted:
On Thursday morning, the Communist Party’s official newspaper Granma reported the names of six people allegedly on the speedboat when it was stopped and claimed that they were “terrorists” attempting to attack the Cuban government.
Among those named are individuals that the Castro regime had previously identified as “terrorists” on a mostly spurious “terror” list featuring human rights activists and YouTubers.
Neither the Castro regime nor the White House have offered any more details at press time on Thursday morning, though some American outlets have claimed to speak to relatives of those on board who suggested that the individuals involved were deeply committed to overthrowing communism in their native country. The Castro regime has a decades-long track record of unjustifiably killing civilians at sea, including children and American citizens, with impunity.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressed on Wednesday that the U.S. would independently verify the circumstances.
“We will know quickly many more facts about this incident than we know right now. The majority of the facts being publicly reported are those by the information provided by the Cubans,” Rubio noted. “We will verify that independently.”
