SAMP­SON NAN­TON and

KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Unit­ed States Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio yes­ter­day called on Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young to sup­port moves against Venezuela’s Nico­las Maduro’s ad­min­is­tra­tion dur­ing a bi­lat­er­al meet­ing in Kingston, Ja­maica.

The US State De­part­ment is­sued a lim­it­ed state­ment on the dis­cus­sions af­ter­wards, say­ing Ru­bio and Young spoke on the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s de­ci­sion to name the dan­ger­ous Venezue­lan gang, Tren de Aragua, as a For­eign Ter­ror­ist Or­gan­i­sa­tion (FTO) and en­cour­ag­ing re­gion­al part­ners to take sim­i­lar steps.

The State De­part­ment added: “Sec­re­tary Ru­bio en­cour­aged Prime Min­is­ter Young to join the Unit­ed States and oth­er Caribbean democ­ra­cies in lim­it­ing ma­lign in­flu­ence in the re­gion.”

How­ev­er, the state­ment said noth­ing on the con­tentious top­ic of the Drag­on gas field lo­cat­ed in Venezue­lan wa­ters, which T&T has been hop­ing to ex­ploit with the back­ing of the US.

The Trump regime has tak­en a hard stance against Venezue­lan oil and gas ex­trac­tion, pro­duc­tion and sales, by threat­en­ing heavy sanc­tions against coun­tries that do en­er­gy busi­ness with the Maduro regime.

Around 1.30 pm yes­ter­day, the State De­part­ment added an­oth­er lay­er to the threats, post­ing on its Face­book page a tweet made by Ru­bio on Tues­day, which read: “The US will not tol­er­ate any third-coun­tries or their oil com­pa­nies pro­duc­ing, ex­tract­ing, or ex­port­ing oil and oil-re­lat­ed prod­ucts with the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

In the state­ment that fol­lowed Ru­bio’s meet­ing with Young yes­ter­day, State De­part­ment spokesper­son Tam­my Bruce bare­ly skimmed over the is­sue of en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty, say­ing, “Sec­re­tary Ru­bio thanked Prime Min­is­ter Young for Trinidad and To­ba­go’s co­op­er­a­tion to pro­mote en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty, deep­en our se­cu­ri­ty part­ner­ship, and en­hance co­or­di­na­tion on the de­por­ta­tion of il­le­gal aliens.”

The Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter (OPM) has promised that Young will speak on his meet­ing with Ru­bio fol­low­ing to­day’s Cab­i­net meet­ing in Port-of-Spain.

The OPM al­so is­sued a state­ment, say­ing yes­ter­day’s dis­cus­sion cen­tred on sev­er­al is­sues, in­clud­ing na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, trade and en­er­gy and added that they were pro­duc­tive, with both par­ties em­pha­sis­ing the im­por­tance of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween both coun­tries and pledg­ing to deep­en ties.

For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dr Amery Browne, who was al­so at yes­ter­day’s meet­ing in Ja­maica, went a lit­tle fur­ther to de­scribe the talks as “ex­cel­lent,” but was un­will­ing to give any more de­tails about the meet­ing when con­tact­ed yes­ter­day.

Pri­or to his trip to Ja­maica, Young had ex­pressed con­fi­dence about the meet­ing, say­ing on Tues­day he was prepar­ing the most com­pelling ar­gu­ment for T&T.

While in Ja­maica, both Ru­bio and Young al­so met sep­a­rate­ly with the chair of the Tran­si­tion­al Pres­i­den­tial Coun­cil of Haiti, Fritz Alphonse Jean, and Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter Mia Mot­t­ley.

Ru­bio al­so dou­bled down on his gov­ern­ment’s stance on Cuban doc­tors, say­ing the US had no re­al prob­lem with Cuban med­ical doc­tors op­er­at­ing in the re­gion, but want­ed to en­sure that Cu­ba was not en­abling forced labour.

Yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing his first bi­lat­er­al meet­ing with Ja­maican Prime Min­is­ter An­drew Hol­ness, Ru­bio said the US is not try­ing to sev­er the pro­gramme utilised by sev­er­al Cari­com na­tions, in­clud­ing T&T, he stressed that the Cuban regime ex­ploits its doc­tors.

“The doc­tors are not paid in many parts of the world. You pay the Cuban gov­ern­ment. The Cuban gov­ern­ment de­cides how much if any­thing to give them. They take away their pass­ports. They ba­si­cal­ly op­er­ate as forced labour in many places.

“Now, there are places that have bet­ter labour stan­dards, per­haps Ja­maica is one of those and that’s fine, but I’m de­scrib­ing gen­er­al­ly what the pro­gramme has been. It has op­er­at­ed in that way in many parts of the world and placed these peo­ple in tremen­dous dan­ger, so I think we can all agree that the traf­fick­ing and labour, be it doc­tors or farm work­ers, is not some­thing that we would want to be sup­port­ive of and we find that to be an egre­gious prac­tice on the part of the Cuban regime... It’s not that they are Cuban doc­tors. It’s that the regime does not pay these doc­tors, take away their pass­ports and ba­si­cal­ly it is in many ways forced labour and that we can­not be in sup­port of.”

How­ev­er, fol­low­ing talks with Ru­bio yes­ter­day, Ja­maica Prime Min­is­ter An­drew Hol­ness made it clear his coun­try was stand­ing by their use of doc­tors from the pro­gramme.

When Guardian Me­dia reached out to Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh yes­ter­day to clar­i­fy whether T&T pays the Cuban gov­ern­ment or the Cuban doc­tors di­rect­ly, he said, “Please al­low the diplo­mat­ic ef­fort to work”.