Juan Forero

And also, sanctions haven't been lifted on Venezuelan companies and on several high-ranking Venezuelan officials.

You cannot go and do business with the state oil company, which is obviously key in Venezuela because a lot of the investments will be in oil.

But what we can say with certainty is that Venezuela has nowhere to go but up.

And Venezuela needs everything.

Venezuela needs imports of food and construction material, pharmaceuticals, chemicals.

And because of the giant possibilities for oil production, the projection is that Venezuela will be able to generate a lot of money.

The U.S.

government has deployed high officials, including the energy secretary and the interior secretary.

They've gone down to Venezuela to meet with officials and so forth, and they've been talking up the investments in oil and critical minerals and so forth, and just how good an investment possibility Venezuela is.

The big question is, will investors follow along?

I interviewed an executive named Charles Myers, who is from Signum Global Advisory, which is a company that recently took down 55 executives from the United States and from Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, Middle East, many different places.

And this was a whole amalgam of executives from all kinds of different companies.

One of the things that he said that was key to all of this, that underscored why they're interested, why they think this is a good place to go into, is one, the oil, that Venezuela has vast amounts of oil, which of course means revenues.

And then secondly, that the U.S.

is a backstop, so guaranteeing that things move forward as opposed to

slipping back.

But of course, the concern that I think people probably should have is we're not 100% on how things are going to turn out in Venezuela, whether Delcy Rodriguez, who's the interim president, is going to stay in charge forever, or whether there's going to be some kind of transition to elections in the future.

Thank you.

Well, Cuba relies on Venezuela more than any other country in the world.

Back in the day, when Venezuela was in much better economic shape, it used to ship more than 100,000 barrels a day in cut rate oil, which is just a huge amount.