The US De­part­ment of State has con­firmed that Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio will dis­cuss a com­mit­ment to de­vel­op­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go’s gas pro­duc­tion for Caribbean en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty dur­ing dis­cus­sions with Cari­com lead­ers in Kingston, Ja­maica to­day.

How­ev­er, Ru­bio will tell Caribbean lead­ers that the US will not sup­port any fur­ther re­gion­al de­pen­den­cy on Venezuela.

The con­fir­ma­tion came dur­ing a US State De­part­ment brief­ing in Wash­ing­ton DC, yes­ter­day, ahead of Ru­bio’s trip to the re­gion, which will al­so in­clude vis­its to Guyana and Suri­name.

The po­si­tion laid out by US Spe­cial En­voy for Latin Amer­i­ca, Mauri­cio Claver-Caron, has raised more ques­tions on whether the Drag­on gas agree­ment be­tween Venezuela and T&T, sup­port­ed by a US li­cence and lim­it­ed sanc­tion waivers, will ma­te­ri­alise.

Claver-Caron said the US is “deeply com­mit­ted” to work­ing with T&T on the gas is­sue, but did not make any pro­nounce­ment on the Drag­on gas mat­ter.

“With Trinidad, which has been an en­er­gy leader in the re­gion, ob­vi­ous­ly it is go­ing through its own de­vel­op­ment as it seeks to re­vi­talise its nat­ur­al gas op­por­tu­ni­ties and is go­ing through that mod­erni­sa­tion as some of the old­er fields and op­por­tu­ni­ties there dry up and they’re look­ing for the new ones.

“There, along with a lot of the chal­lenges posed with Venezuela, we’re deeply com­mit­ted to work­ing with Trinidad to fig­ur­ing out how to re-en­er­gise that – those nat­ur­al gas op­por­tu­ni­ties and en­sure that its econ­o­my con­tin­ues to move for­ward de­spite the chal­lenges pre­sent­ed with Venezuela and oth­er­wise.”

Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, who has led the Drag­on gas talks in his ca­pac­i­ty as Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, will at­tend to­day’s meet­ing and ac­cord­ing to the State De­part­ment, is one of the lead­ers that Sec­re­tary Ru­bio in­tends to have bi­lat­er­al talks with.

Yes­ter­day, while speak­ing out­side the Bel­mont Sec­ondary School in Port-of-Spain, Young told re­porters he in­tends to make the “most com­pelling ar­gu­ment” for T&T’s in­ter­ests.

“I be­lieve in Trinidad and To­ba­go, and I know what are the best ar­gu­ments for us to put for­ward,” Young said.

He con­tin­ued: “I have not been in con­tact since the spe­cif­ic com­ment that you are re­fer­ring to from Sec­re­tary of State Ru­bio. There’s al­so been some di­a­logue or some state­ment from the Pres­i­dent’s Of­fice in the Unit­ed States, Pres­i­dent Trump. These are things that we mon­i­tor care­ful­ly and close­ly, and I re­main in con­tact with the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment man­ag­ing it.”

How­ev­er, Claver-Caron has made it clear the US does not see Venezuela hav­ing any ma­jor role in the fu­ture of the re­gion’s en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty.

He not­ed that Sec­re­tary Ru­bio’s de­ci­sion to al­so vis­it Guyana and Suri­name is to help those na­tions be­come key en­er­gy sup­pli­ers to the Caribbean.

“To­geth­er with Guyana and Suri­name, which – and ob­vi­ous­ly the his­to­ry of Trinidad with nat­ur­al gas – this is an op­por­tu­ni­ty that coun­tries from the Cari­com com­mu­ni­ty, from the re­gion, are go­ing to be able to sup­port each oth­er, to be able to cre­ate an en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty frame­work, which has al­ready changed the geopol­i­tics of the re­gion,” he said.

In this re­gard, he said Ru­bio will give a com­mit­ment to help­ing se­cure Guyana from threats made by Venezuela.

Claver-Caron was asked to ex­plain how Caribbean coun­tries would be im­pact­ed by the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s de­ci­sion to im­pose a 25 per cent tar­iff on any coun­try that pur­chas­es oil or gas from Venezuela.

He said since Pres­i­dent Trump’s 2019 max­i­mum pres­sure pol­i­cy, there has been a re­duc­tion in en­er­gy sales from Venezuela to the re­gion. 

The ex­cep­tion, he said, was Cu­ba, which he not­ed gets 45,000 bar­rels per day “at no cost and no in­come” to Venezuela.  

Claver-Caron said this re­duc­tion cre­ates a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty for T&T, Guyana and Suri­name.

“The fact that these Cari­com na­tions, that Guyana and Suri­name, and then ob­vi­ous­ly on the nat­ur­al gas front kind of in the re­vi­tal­iza­tion of how­ev­er we can help in Trinidad in that re­gards, are re­al­ly unique op­por­tu­ni­ties there. And that’s what we re­al­ly need to be fo­cused on, be­cause we don’t want to have a rekin­dling of the past and of all the trou­bles and is­sues that the de­pen­den­cy on Venezuela brought to the is­lands of the Caribbean.”

The meet­ing will al­so dis­cuss the use of Cuban doc­tors in the Caribbean.

“The qual­i­ty of Cuban doc­tors and the work they’ve done in the Caribbean, in Haiti, et cetera, is great; it’s ex­tra­or­di­nary.  What we are ask­ing is that they not sup­port hu­man traf­fick­ing,” Claver-Caron said.