Cuban officials are expected to announce on Monday night that the country’s Communist government is open to foreign investment, including from the United States, Cuba’s deputy prime minister told NBC News.
The announcement comes as the island’s battered economy faces a severe energy crisis. 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 a 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.
“Cuba is open to having a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies, also with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants,” Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga said on NBC.
The government will also announce that it is open to investments beyond the private sector, including in the country’s aging infrastructure, Mr. Pérez-Oliva Fraga also reportedly told NBC.
But because of the decade-long U.S. embargo, Cuba is not easily able to attract American capital, the deputy prime minister, a key figure in its economic policy, said.
Powerful voices within the Cuban exile community in Florida and elsewhere have for years been pushing for the Cuban government to allow Cubans overseas to invest in the nation’s economy.
A person close to the negotiations said that the Trump administration was waiting to see whether the changes 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 Gimenez, 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.”
The Trump administration has warned that if Cuba does notmake changes, 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.
In a televised news conference on Friday, President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba acknowledged that his government was engaged in talks with Trump administration officials to resolve the standoff.
In his 90-minute address, 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.” It appeared to be a strong suggestion of a change in economic policies to would allow Cuban Americans and others around the world to own businesses and invest in the private sector on the island.
Demographers estimate that more than two million Cubans have left the country in the past five years. In his address, 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.”
On Sunday, President Trump touched on the topic of Cuba while traveling to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. “Cuba’s a failed nation,” he said. “Cuba also wants to make a deal. And I think we will pretty soon. Or either make a deal or do whatever we have to do.”
Cuban officials have signaled to some Cuban Americans that Monday’s announcement will involve allowing exiles to return to the island freely and to own small enterprises that were legally recognized by the government in 2021. They function as limited liability companies that can 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 stories but carry a far broader selection of food.
For the exiles to return and run businesses, the U.S. government would have to ease restrictions on traveling and doing business in Cuba.
Hugo Cancio, a Cuban American in Miami, has been running perhaps the most visible foreign-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, will 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.
Annie Correal is a Latin America correspondent for The Times.
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