by Natasha Lair-McKenty — TravelPulse Canada
Tue January 13, 2026

Cuba says Canadians continue to travel to the destination in strong numbers.

In a statement released this week, Cuban tourism officials said the country remains fully operational for international visitors and continues to welcome Canadians, who have long been one of its most important source markets.

“Canada has always been a loyal and essential market for Cuba,” said Juan Carlos García Granda, Cuba’s Minister of Tourism.

“We continue to welcome Canadian visitors with the same warmth, safety, and quality of service they know and trust. The sustained growth in air capacity and demand clearly shows that Canadians feel confident travelling to Cuba and continue to choose our island for their holidays. I very much want to thank them for their tremendous support.”

Cuba says Canada remains a cornerstone market for tourism, with the destination ranking sixth among international travel choices for Canadians. More than 300,000 airline seats are scheduled between Canada and Cuba in the first quarter of 2026.

Direct air service currently connects Canadian travellers to seven destinations across the island. Tourism officials say consistently high load factors have supported new routes and allowed some seasonal services to be extended into year-round operations, increasing choice and accessibility for Canadian travellers.

Alongside airlift growth, Cuba has introduced several new tourism products this winter aimed at expanding its all-inclusive offerings.

One of the additions is the “Santa Maria All In” concept, which extends the resort experience beyond individual hotels across the wider Santa Maria area. The program allows guests to access dining, entertainment and leisure experiences at three tourist plazas, Gallery, Las Dunas and The One Collection, at no additional cost. Amenities include restaurants, bars, bowling, a creamery and a complimentary shuttle service operating from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m.

Cuba has also opened “The Splash Santa Maria” water park, which officially launched on January 3 in the Santa Maria Arena area. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., it is the country’s only water park of its kind and is designed to appeal to families.

For longer-stay travellers, new Snowbird Villas have been introduced at Playas del Este, located about 30 minutes from Havana. The fully equipped villas include a swimming pool, children’s play area, 24-hour Wi-Fi and satellite TV.

Tourism officials say the new offerings are part of a broader effort to diversify Cuba’s tourism product while maintaining the familiarity that has kept Canadian travellers returning to the island year after year.

Havana, January 11 (Prensa Latina) Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez today defended the transparency and rights of his government in international relations and criticized the US administration for contrary practices, including military coercion.

Through his account on the social network X, the island’s Minister of Foreign Affairs stated that his country does not receive and has never received monetary or material compensation for security services provided to any country.

In contrast, he emphasized that “unlike the #USA, we do not have a government that lends itself to mercenary activity, blackmail, or military coercion against other states.”

In Sunday’s publication, Rodríguez argued that the Caribbean nation has the absolute right to import fuel from markets willing to export it and that exercise their right to develop their commercial relations, “without interference or subordination to unilateral coercive measures by the US,” he added.

In this regard, he noted that “the US behaves like a criminal and uncontrolled hegemon that threatens peace and security, not only in Cuba and this hemisphere, but throughout the world.”

Law and justice are on Cuba’s side, concluded the head of Foreign Affairs of the Caribbean nation.

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Mexico has become a key supplier of oil to Cuba after Venezuela’s exports fell, drawing criticism from US lawmakers and adding strain to ties with President Trump

Bloomberg / Business Standard — Jan 10, 2026 

By Gonzalo Soto

 A tanker carrying between 85,000 and 90,000 barrels of oil arrived in Havana from Mexico amid growing tensions with the US over the shipments after the fall of Venezuela’s ousted President Nicolás Maduro last week. 

According to shipping reports and vessel movements tracked by Bloomberg, the tanker Ocean Mariner was last seen en route to the Cuban capital at 2.39 p.m. UTC on Friday and was expected to arrive at its destination at 3 a.m.   

The vessel departed the Pajaritos Petrochemical complex, operated by state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), in Mexico’s Veracruz state on Jan. 5. The news was reported earlier by Agence France-Presse.

Neither President Claudia Sheinbaum’s office nor Pemex responded immediately to a request for comment outside of office hours.

Mexico has become a key supplier of oil to the Caribbean island after the US captured Maduro, generating criticism from American lawmakers and further straining ties between Sheinbaum’s administration and President Donald Trump. 

On Wednesday, Sheinbaum said that Mexico will continue supplying oil to Cuba, describing the shipments in part as humanitarian aid. 

“With the current situation in Venezuela, Mexico has become an important supplier,” she told reporters at her daily press conference on Wednesday. “Previously it was Venezuela, but it’s part of what has historically been sent.” 

Sheinbaum said some of Mexico’s oil exports to Cuba are covered by contractual obligations.

January 10, 2026 — Belly of the Beast

The Cuban government has now confirmed that 32 of its nationals were killed in Venezuela trying to protect President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores when they were abducted by U.S. Special Forces last Saturday. Below, we break down what we know so far and talk to Cubans about how they feel about what’s going on.

We also take a deep dive into why these Cubans were in Venezuela in the first place — and why claims that they were an army “propping up” Maduro don’t hold up.

This week’s story was written by Ed Augustin and Reed Lindsay, along with contributions from Amba Guerguerian and Liz Oliva Fernández, in collaboration with Drop Site, an investigative news organization dedicated to exposing the crimes of the powerful.

“No Country Has the Right to Invade Another”

Cubans observed two official days of mourning earlier this week after a contingent of its security forces were massacred guarding Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. Flags were flown at half-mast, and concerts were canceled.

“No country has the right to invade another,” one woman told us on the streets of Havana. “Those Cubans were there at the request of the Venezuelan government to protect Maduro…The blood we’ve shed unites us.”

Are people on the island afraid that Cuba could be next?

“What’s happening in Venezuela can happen to any Latin American country, so I’m afraid,” said Adriannys Poll, a 19-year-old college student studying microbiology. “I want to graduate, but you don’t know what could happen in the next three years of Donald Trump’s presidency.”

“Everyone knows it’s about oil. I don’t think they’ll come and bomb Cuba,” hoped one person.

“We’ve lived under threat our entire lives, even [of] an invasion. And we defeated them,” said another.

​Watch the interviews here​

What We Know About the Cubans Who Died

One hundred people, including civilians and security forces, were killed in the U.S. attack on Venezuela, according to Venezuela’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

​The Guardian reports it took the U.S. two hours and twenty-eight minutes from the time its helicopters touched down in Maduro’s compound in Caracas at 2:01 a.m. to seize the former president and his wife. Maduro, the paper reported, had tightened his security measures leading up to his abduction and was relying more heavily on Cuban bodyguards.

But the lack of a response from the Venezuelan military and the disparity in the death toll — the U.S. reported no casualties — have fueled speculation about betrayal.

Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez fired General Javier Marcano Tábata, who headed the Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence and was responsible for Maduro’s security. Rodríguez herself has come under question due to a report that she and her brother, President of the National Assembly Jorge Rodríguez, had been leading talks in Qatar with the Trump administration about a “more acceptable” alternative to Maduro in the months leading up to the U.S. attack.

But the imbalance in casualties may have more mundane explanations.

“The casualty rate may reflect the superior U.S. technology and a clear order for U.S. troops to fire at anything or everything they see,” said Fulton Armstrong, former U.S. national intelligence officer for Latin America, who emphasized how U.S. forces, arriving undetected, had the element of surprise on their side.

“The Americans obviously came in with a great deal of firepower and simply overwhelmed them,” said Hal Klepak, Professor Emeritus of History and Strategy at the Royal Military College of Canada and a former NATO analyst who also served as an advisor to that country’s foreign and defense ministers. “That’s an American tactic throughout Latin American history over almost two centuries. You don’t go in with the minimum; you go in with the maximum.”

Venezuela’s Defense Minister Vladímir Padrino on Sunday read a statement from the Bolivarian Armed Forces, accusing the Trump administration of “murdering in cold blood a large part of their security team, soldiers and innocent citizens.”

On Tuesday, Cuba published the headshots, names, ranks and ages of the 32 Cuban officers killed by the U.S.

The list included colonels, lieutenants, majors, captains and reservists ranging in age from 26 to 60.

But questions remain about how the Cubans were killed.

What Were Cuban Security Forces Doing in Venezuela?

After the election of socialist President Hugo Chávez in 1998, Venezuela quickly became Cuba’s closest ally. Early in his term, Chávez signed alongside Fidel Castro the Cuba-Venezuela Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement that saw Cuban specialists lend their expertise in Venezuela in the fields of culture, education, health and more.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, but its healthcare system had always faced medicine and staff shortages. Cuba sent thousands of doctors and nurses to work in Venezuela, where they were paid many times the tiny salaries they earned in Cuba. In exchange, Venezuela shipped oil to the island.

For years, U.S. officials complained that Venezuela was propping up Cuba with subsidized oil. Then, in 2019, the first Trump administration flipped the script.

That year, Trump called Maduro a “Cuban puppet.” Vice President Mike Pence accused Cuba of keeping the Venezuelan people “hostage.” U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams said Venezuela was a “colony” of Cuba, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed the island was “the true imperialist power in Venezuela.”

Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, who oversaw a failed effort with then Senator Marco Rubio to bring about regime change in Venezuela, claimed there were 20,000 Cuban “thugs” propping up the Maduro government. “Maduro would fall by midnight” if not for the Cubans, Bolton told reporters in April 2019. (For more, see the second episode of our award-winning documentary series, The War on Cuba).

That narrative gained new traction in recent months as the Trump administration ramped up political and military pressure on Venezuela.

In October, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado likened the presence of Cuban advisors inside Venezuela to an “invasion” and made it part of her push for U.S. military intervention.

“I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro,” Rubio told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

No credible evidence that Cuba had thousands of troops in Venezuela has been presented.

What has been verified is that thousands of Cubans have gone to Venezuela to work as doctors and nurses, as well as teachers and sports coaches.

One of them is Dr. Lyhen Fernández Baez, a urologist who is the mother of Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández. (Liz conducted a mother-daughter interview with her, asking about her experience serving on a medical mission in Venezuela in Episode Two of the War on Cuba.)

Manufacturing a Security Crisis

For months, the Trump administration said its deadly boat strikes and military buildup in the Caribbean were aimed at fighting “narcoterrorism.” The Justice Department claimed Maduro was leading a drug trafficking organization called “Cartel de los Soles.”

But this week, the administration quietly dropped that claim in a revised indictment, acknowledging that Cartel de los Soles isn’t a real cartel — even as Maduro still faces narcoterrorism and cocaine trafficking charges in a federal court.

Concocting far-fetched accusations to legitimize hostility has been the U.S. government’s go-to playbook for decades when it comes to Venezuela and Cuba. For example, the island occupies multiple State Department blacklists, accused of carrying out human trafficking via its medical missions and even sponsoring terrorism despite consensus to the contrary in the U.S. intelligence community.

The close relationship between Cuba and Venezuela has also provided fodder for neoconservatives like Abrams and Bolton, who both have decades of experience scheming up ways of overthrowing governments around the world.

Abrams, convicted for “withholding information from Congress” during the Iran-Contra Affair, was “the crucial figure” in Washington during the bungled Venezuela coup d’état that briefly deposed President Hugo Chávez from power in 2002, according to The Guardian. (The New York Times on Wednesday released a 52-minute interview with Abrams to help their readers understand “what is actually happening in Venezuela.”)

Bolton, who once falsely claimed that Cuba was developing biological weapons, argued in 2019 that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela form a “troika of tyranny” and a “triangle of terror” in the Western Hemisphere, reminiscent of the “axis of evil” rhetoric employed during the George W. Bush years.

Led by Bolton and Abrams, the Trump administration did not abandon the claim that Venezuela propped up Cuba; it simply doubled down on the reverse accusation.

U.S. officials have toggled between portraying Caracas as Havana’s benefactor and Havana as Caracas’s puppet master — contradictory narratives that nonetheless converged on the same policy goal: sweeping “maximum pressure” sanctions on both countries, including measures aimed at cutting Venezuelan oil exports.

“Patently False” Claims

Security experts say U.S. government claims about Cuba’s influence in Venezuela are grossly exaggerated.

Ben Rhodes, a former U.S. deputy national security advisor who played a key role in negotiating the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations during President Barack Obama’s second term, has disputed the claim that Cuban military personnel in Venezuela numbered in the tens of thousands.

“The only way you get to those numbers is to count doctors as security officials,” Rhodes said in an interview conducted in 2019.

“The number of Cuban security officials alleged by the U.S. government was patently false,” said Armstrong. “The vast majority are civilian doctors, teachers and coaches, and many are women.”

“We know that there were indeed Cubans in Maduro’s security detail, but perhaps now, we can also put to rest that the Cubans ‘ran’ Venezuela’s security plan because they apparently didn’t have any indication of the attack until it was upon them,” he added.

Cuban-Venezuelan cooperation deepened after the 2002 coup, with the Cubans assisting in the creation of security services and military intelligence capacity in Venezuela, according to Klepak.

He added that Cuban officers posted within the Venezuelan armed forces’ command system have also long been connected to natural disaster relief efforts.

“The UN has often hailed Cuba’s [disaster response] system as the best or one of the best in the world and a model for other countries. Venezuela is prone to natural disasters, but its forces had a dismal record for dealing with them. Thus, asking Cuba for assistance was obvious,” he said. “But the idea that this tiny military presence is in any way an occupying army or that it is anything like 1,000 people, never mind 25,000 people, is simply politically motivated.”

Cuba’s Long History of Resisting U.S. Intervention

It’s not surprising that Venezuela would turn to Cuba for help in defending itself from U.S. aggression.

The island has weathered a U.S.-backed invasion, acts of sabotage, repeated terrorist attacks and numerous assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. Cuba’s intelligence service is renowned, in particular for repeatedly outmaneuvering the CIA.

Decades ago, Cuba was also known for an internationalist military that punched above its weight, sending military contingents to face off against U.S.-backed forces in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

While Abrams was secretly arming right-wing paramilitaries to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s, Cuba sent their Marxist allies military advisors.

When the leftist New Jewel Movement came to power on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada after it won independence from Britain, Cuba sent military personnel to support the fledgling government. The Reagan administration called Grenada a “Cuban-Soviet colony” in 1983 and invaded it.

Cuba’s most successful foreign military intervention was in Angola, where Cuban soldiers fought with the left-wing People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). From 1975 to 1991, Cuba deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to the country — by far the largest overseas military engagement ever conducted by a Latin American country. Cuba was also credited with helping bring about the fall of apartheid in South Africa.

“The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom and justice unparalleled for its principled and selfless character,” said Nelson Mandela during a visit to Cuba in 1991.

But when the Soviet Union disintegrated, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin, and its military internationalism ended.

“The Cuban armed forces were cut massively from between 270,000–290,000 in the 1980s to between 55,000–60,000,” said Klepak, adding that Cuba’s military has been reduced to home defense with little to no capacity to project force beyond the island.

An Inconvenient Truth for Regime Changers

Over the years, Cuba has become one of the U.S. government’s most reliable security partners in the Caribbean.

Since the 1990s, Cuban and U.S. armed forces have collaborated closely on counternarcotics operations and efforts to stop illegal migration, according to Klepak. Cuba’s strategy, Klepak argues, has been “to create a body of people in the U.S. government who see Cuba as a natural and effective ally in security issues.”
​

With the days of large-scale Cuban military internationalism long gone, regime change proponents are left with an inconvenient truth.

According to Klepak, “however much both sides try to downplay it, until the first Trump administration, the closest security relationship that Cuba had was with the United States of America.”

Now, with Maduro out of the picture and nearly three dozen Cubans dead, the claims that Cuba is propping up Venezuela appear more absurd than ever.

The opposite claim — that Venezuela is propping up Cuba — may also no longer be true.

In 2025, Venezuela was shipping less than 30,000 barrels a day to the island, about 70% less than what it was sending a decade earlier. This fuel lifeline has been further cut in recent weeks as the Trump administration ordered “a total and complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers. In December, the U.S. started seizing Venezuelan oil tankers at gunpoint.

In recent years, Mexico has become a major supplier of oil to Cuba, with President Claudia Sheinbaum portraying the shipments as part of her government’s humanitarian efforts in the Caribbean and a longstanding policy of Mexico.

The U.S. is pressuring the interim administration in Venezuela to stop oil shipments to Cuba, but it is not clear yet what will happen to other aspects of the two countries’ relationship or whether the Cuban doctors, nurses and teachers who are serving on humanitarian missions in Venezuela will be forced to return home.

If they are, they may be replaced by U.S. oil executives.

Rubio said on Wednesday that the administration was about to finalize a deal with the Venezuelan government to “take all the oil,” adding that the U.S. had “a lot of leverage” because of its continuing blockade on Venezuelan oil exports.

Meanwhile, the heads of Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips met with Trump Friday to discuss his plans to “run” Venezuela and control its oil industry.

At the meeting, Trump continued to vex those looking for an end-game behind his assault. “We are open for business,” he said. “China can buy all the oil they want from us, there or in the United States. Russia can get all the oil they need from us.”

Monterrey, Mexico, Jan 9 (Prensa Latina) The Committee of Solidarity with Venezuela, in the Mexican city of Monterrey, the solidarity movement with Cuba and the National Association of Democratic Lawyers of the Nuevo León state section, condemned the US military aggression against Caracas.

Similarly, last night solidarity groups reaffirmed their commitment to peace on the continent.

“The political-military actions we have just seen in Venezuela, based on cyber and technological air-space warfare, as well as the threats of the application throughout our America of the Monroe Doctrine developed by Donald Trump and the clique that governs today in the United States, openly represent a threat to all of humanity.”

“They also generate destabilization, death, destruction, looting, theft and exploitation of natural and economic resources of the peoples of the world,” said activist María de la Paz Quintanilla on Thursday night.

At the event, held in the Plaza del Colegio Civil in the city of Monterrey, located about 800 kilometers north of this capital, de la Paz Quintanilla, a member of the Martí Alternative for Our America (Mexico chapter) and of the Mexican movement of solidarity with Cuba in Monterrey, denounced the hegemonic power for “opening war fronts throughout the world and deepening the genocide in the attempt to solve the crisis of the capitalist system.”

“Trump’s threat,” the Monterrey-based activist added, “reflects the context of a social and environmental catastrophe (…) and is symptomatic of a crisis whose promoters ignore the most basic principles of international law.”

He also made an urgent call to take steps to articulate a broad front of social movements and political forces, acting not from a defensive position, but from a revolutionary offensive, which requires profound transformations to confront imperial domination.

“Let all of us who fight for a just society, free from exploitation, oppression, exclusion and discrimination, commit ourselves to agreeing on what we have in common in order to face the threat of the war that is intended to be waged against our peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean, and against the peoples of the global south in other continents, a war that in its extreme reaches genocide, as in Gaza, and brings the planet closer to a conflagration of global dimensions,” he emphasized.

In an exclusive interview with Prensa Latina, Ernesto Villareal Landeros, representative of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers from the Nuevo León state section, asserted that “Latin Americans have the need and the obligation to study the historical interventionist role of the US, trampling on the dignity and development of our peoples, at the mercy of the exploitation of their natural resources.”

“It’s not just about knowing history, but about becoming aware of the predatory attitude of the United States. There are many examples of this in Mexico, Panama, the Dominican Republic, the shameful and outrageous economic blockade against Cuba for more than 60 years, and the current criminal actions of Donald Trump against the legal structure of Venezuela. This compels us to reaffirm our struggles, following the example of our liberators,” Villareal Landeros emphasized.

Among other speakers, representatives of the Monterrey-based “People to People” Brigade, in solidarity with Cuba, took the floor.

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Mexico City, Jan 8 (Prensa Latina) Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated today that blockades harm nations and reaffirmed her commitment to providing humanitarian aid to Cuba, which is under attack from an economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States.

“From our perspective, blockades harm people, beyond governments, and we seek to provide humanitarian aid,” the president asserted in response to a question about the island during her regular meeting with the media.

From Cuernavaca, in the central state of Morelos, the head of the Executive Branch stated that after the damage caused by the powerful Hurricane Melissa in the eastern region of the largest of the Antilles, Mexico “provided support, as it has provided support to many other countries.”

Sheinbaum reaffirmed yesterday that her nation sends oil to Cuba as part of contracts and humanitarian aid, noting that no more is being sent than has been sent historically.

On December 22nd, the leader emphasized the historical relationship between her country and the island.

In mentioning energy cooperation and visits by Cuban leaders to Mexico and vice versa for decades, regardless of the political affiliation of the leaders in this North American nation, Sheinbaum stressed that the ties with the Caribbean country are not something new.

“This is not a new situation, and everything is done within the framework of the law and also for humanitarian reasons,” she noted, reiterating Mexico’s sovereignty and mentioning that it is continuing a series of support measures that his nation has historically provided to Cuba.

According to the most recent data, the US blockade against the Caribbean country caused damages estimated at seven billion 556.1 million dollars between March 2024 and last February, an increase of 49 percent compared to the previous period.

In the health sector alone, that policy resulted in losses of nearly $300 million in one year, while the impact in the energy sector exceeded $496 million due to restrictions on importing fuels and spare parts.

On October 29, Cuba achieved a new victory in the United Nations General Assembly by obtaining 165 votes in favor of the resolution calling for an end to the blockade.

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