Kayla Dwyer

This is an extraordinary event that we have never seen in the Caribbean before.

And what makes it extraordinary is that this seizure of this oil, this Venezuelan oil, is going to put a chill on insurers who insure these kind of cargos.

And this would be really tightening the grip of the U.S., the pressure on the Maduro regime.

Oil is really one of the main, if not the only thing that Venezuela really sells.

And it's the main revenue generator for this economy.

We've seen this economy shrink drastically in the last several years because of the sanctions and because of the difficulty for Venezuela to find a market for its oil.

US officials have long suspected the Maduro regime of selling sanctioned crude oil through Cuba illegally in order to benefit from the profits and also making the sales harder to trace.

So in the view of US officials, this was one way that they were able to carry out corruption was by taking oil to Cuba and selling it on the black market.