Cuba Reportedly Seeking Investments From Cuban Descendants Living Abroad as Trump Plots ‘Friendly Takeover’

Cuba is opening its economy up — slightly — to welcome foreign investment from Cuban descendants living abroad in the United States and elsewhere, a top government official told NBC News on Monday.

Miami-based NBC News correspondent George Solis traveled to Havana to get the story firsthand from Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, Cuba’s deputy prime minister and the man “in charge of breathing life into Cuba’s struggling economy.”

Fraga said one way he plans on doing that is by having a more “fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies,” as well as “Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants”; many of those descendants had family members flee the Caribbean island after the communist takeover in 1959. Fraga is expected to announce the change in economic policy to his fellow Cubans on Monday night.

The government official said his plan is to build a “dynamic business environment” that revamps several sectors, from mining to tourism.

“This extends beyond the commercial sphere,” he added. “It also applies to investments — not only small investments, but also large investments, particularly in infrastructure.”

His sit-down interview with NBC comes a week after President Donald Trump floated a “friendly takeover” of Cuba that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be in charge of.

Trump said Rubio is the best man to help Cuba move from its communist government to a more pro-USA regime, because the Cubans “trust” him and because he speaks Spanish, “which is always nice and always helpful,” he added.

“It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter because they’re really down to, as they say , fumes. They have no energy, they have no money. They’re in deep trouble on a humanitarian basis,” Trump continued. “And we don’t want to see that. But they were very very bad to a lot of people, as you know.”

Cuba has also admitted to holding secret meetings with the Trump administration, which The New York Times reported last week. Those meetings have been held as the country grapples with a fuel shortage and “unstable” power grid, as the report said.

Watch NBC’s report above.

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