Samuel Martin - U.S. Sanctions to Block Oil Shipments to Cuba

New U.S. Sanctions Seek to Block Venezuelan Oil Shipments to Cuba

Summary
Because of the political turmoil in Venezuela, the Trump administration has announced sanctions against President Nicolas Madura and his oil shipments to Cuba. This means that no US citizens will be allowed to buy any of Venezuela's oil that it is shipping. Mike Pence's hopes are that cutting off Venezuela's number one source of revenue will encourage talks between Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba, Russia, and China all support Madura's leadership while the United States supports the revolutionary Juan Guaidó, Venezuelan opposition leader, who claimed to be the interim president and wants to "dethrone" Maduro. Trump believes that the sanctions will "tighten the noose" around Maduro's leadership, but no signs of Maduro's departure are prominent. Trump's administration says that military response would be enacted if there was any threat of Guaidó's arrest.

Analysis

This article was written on Friday, April 5th, 2019 in Washington. This means that the authors are very close to the source (the US government). I already knew about the revolt in Venezuela, but I didn't know that the US government imposed sanctions on the oil trade industry to try to cut off Venezuela's source of revenue. This is very similar to the 1973 Oil Crisis when Arab states stopped shipping oil to the US because of America's support of Israel. This lead to massive rises in the price of oil in the US and at points, even quadrupled the price. The audience of this article is all Americans because we could be affected by the loss of this source of oil, which we heavily rely on for machines, cars, etc. Annie Karni and Nicholas Casey who are the Andesand White House Correspondents, respectively. The article is written because we need to be mindful of our government's foreign policies which may affect us in the future even though we may not realize it. The article is important because we could have another oil crisis soon from our own actions.


Source
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/us/politics/trump-sanctions-venezuela-cuba.html