Cuba is open to broad talks with the United States and allowing more investment but will not discuss changing its political system, an envoy from the island told AFP on Tuesday.

Both the US and Cuban presidents, Donald Trump and Miguel Diaz-Canel, have acknowledged discussions between the two countries as Cuba faces major economic problems, including a nationwide blackout on Monday.

Trump has said that he expects Cuba to reach an unspecified deal quickly with him but has also boasted that he will have "the honour of taking Cuba" after he attacked its ally Venezuela as well as Iran.

Tanieris Dieguez, Cuba's deputy chief of mission in Washington, said that the two neighbouring countries "have a lot of things to put on the table" but that neither should ask the other to change its government.

"Nothing related with our political system, nothing with our political model – our constitutional model – is part of the negotiations, and never will it be part of that," she said.

"The only thing that Cuba asks for any conversation is respect to our sovereignty and to our right to self-determination," she said.

The New York Times, quoting unnamed US officials, said that the Trump administration has called for Cuba to sack Diaz-Canel, who is seen as resistant to change.

Havana announced on Monday that it would allow Cubans overseas to invest and own businesses on the island, which has had a socialist economy since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American and vociferous critic of Havana's government, said the reforms were "not dramatic enough."

The Cuban envoy said that Havana was open to further US investment but that the issue was the trade embargo imposed by the United States almost continuously since 1959.

"We are open to receive any American interests, businessmen, or whatever," Dieguez said. "The main obstacle to that is the big conglomerate of rules that is the blockade today," she said, explaining that international investors were scared off by US sanctions.

After deposing and snatching Venezuela's leftist president Nicolas Maduro on January 3, the United States has blocked the South American country's oil shipments to Cuba, which relied on its ally for half its needs.

Dieguez said the cut-off had knock-on effects, including by impeding the transport and storage of temperature-sensitive medical supplies. She said that more than 3,000 children have gone without vaccinations in a country that has long prided itself on universal medical coverage.

"It's collective punishment," she said.

Rubio has previously blamed Cuba's communist system for the country's economic problems. (AFP)



Edited by Cecil Wong