Keith Adams

Mexico, where I am currently, they can't step up because they are going to be engaged in talks over renegotiated North American free trade agreement, the USMCA, over the summer.

And again, Washington made it abundantly clear that they don't expect Mexico to step up to fill the void of Venezuela, who's left in terms of Cuba's allies.

Russia obviously has its own issues.

currently dedicating its resources to the war in Ukraine.

So the picture for the island is quite honestly the bleakest it has been this century.

We've heard from the President, Diaz-Canel, saying they're trying to find solutions, but one genuinely wonders what those solutions will be and exactly what they can offer to Washington beyond wholesale root-and-branch reform that would be acceptable to the Trump administration.

Yeah.

And given Marco Rubio's history and his position on Cuba, you wonder what they would would satisfy the White House short of regime change.

Exactly.

And I think that is the issue, because in Venezuela, they've shown that they're willing to work with an interim president.

that involves the remnants of Nicolas Maduro's administration.

I'm not sure that that will be the case in the Cuban example.

And so it seems that the intention, as so stated by Marco Rubio himself, really, is to basically squeeze the island now by cutting off its oil to a point that the humanitarian crisis is such that there is some kind of reaction on the streets already.

or requiring, from Washington's perspective, some kind of intervention.

But it's a very, very risky game, and of course ordinary Cubans, like the one we heard at the beginning, are sort of trapped in the middle of all of that.

Will Grant.

Japan heads to the polls again this Sunday, the second general election in as many years.

Prime Minister Sanae Takeuchi, Japan's first female leader, is betting on her personal popularity to do what her party failed to do last year, secure a clear mandate for the long-ruling but unpopular Liberal Democratic Party.

But Sunday's elections will also test the appetite for her plans to boost public spending when inflation and cost of living is uppermost in voters' minds.

Our Tokyo correspondent, Shaima Khalil, has been speaking to voters about what's at stake.