Marco Rubio is just as Donald Trump described him. Little. Little Marco. He is now the US Secretary of State responsible for administering and enforcing, in collaboration with the US Treasury Secretary and its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), US sanctions against its chosen ‘enemy’ nations, entities and individuals. Rubio is Cuban-American. Although he was born in Miami in 1971, his parents migrated from Cuba in the 1950s. He claimed that his parents fled Cuba after 1959, the year Fidel Castro assumed power. In October 2011, the Washington Post reported that Marco’s family had left Cuba in 1956, three years before Castro, during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Rubio insinuated that his family had fled the dictates of Communism. That they were victims and survivors of Communism. He belongs to a significant minority of the Miami population who are sworn haters of Socialism, Cuba, and its Latin American allies like Venezuela. In this crossfire, Trinidad and Tobago has been caught. On April 8, Prime Minister Stuart Young stated: “We have now been informed that our licence from OFAC, which is dated the 18th of December 2023, has been revoked by OFAC, and that licence is now revoked by OFAC as well as our Cocuina/Manakin licence.” OFAC, under Rubio, revoked the licences granted by that agency which had allowed our country relief from US-imposed sanctions against Venezuela to mine our cross-border gas fields, Dragon and Cocuina/Manakin. In one stroke of the pen, Rubio had attacked the Government and peoples of Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela, and the upstream British gas miners, Shell and BP. This attack by Rubio is a significant attack on the peoples of Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela. This is not just a Government, or PNM or UNC, or Maduro matter. Trinidad and Tobago’s economy is at an extraordinarily precarious juncture. On the one hand, we have an Opposition party and its leader promising manna from heaven. No property tax, no increments in WASA and T&TEC rates, lower gas prices, increase in represented worker salaries across the board, building this and building that! This fairy godmother’s approach to our economy is extremely reckless. Should our people, out of sheer desperation and frustration over PNM rule, elect the UNC to government on April 28, these promises can only be met at the cost of extreme fiscal crisis, leading to severe devaluation, a weak TT$, a catastrophic attack on the masses of our civilian population. Even as reckless has been the UNC leader’s continual attack on the Venezuelan government, already under heavy attack by US sanctions: its foreign assets frozen, its key leaders blacklisted and issued travel bans, and blocks on its gold, oil, debt, currency, digital currency, commercial markets, central bank, and PDVSA, its core local oil producer. These blocks and bans apply to US and non-US individuals, entities and nations engaged in transactions with Venezuela. Lacking any credible plan for Government income flows in the short or medium terms, the UNC leader has cut off the people of Trinidad and Tobago, under any government that she might lead, from potential access to our lucrative cross-border gas assets with Maduro’s Venezuela. On the other hand, the PNM has angered, frustrated and hamstrung our people with its tardy and tired approach to the crime epidemic. While it is untrue that it has not put all its eggs in the cross-border gas assets, as the Opposition claims – it had been copiously tendering bids in both our offshore and onshore fields - it has certainly put nearly all our eggs in the gas basket. Say gas, and there are former and current PM Rowley and Young, rushing off to this or that European or US capital to buy, borrow, beg or bid. If they had spent the same energy on non-energy projects over the last ten years, we would have been better fit to forestall the economic crisis which now confronts us. And why beg? Why beg Rubio? There is no international law which authorises any single government to impose sanctions on other nations. The United Nations, a collaborative organisation, has been given this authority. Not single nations. And why do we need a licence from Marco and OFAC again? Does the US own any territory in Trinidad and Tobago or Venezuela, either land or marine assets? How can you grant, withhold or revoke a licence for that which you have no lease, ownership or legal right? Why are our PMs running with their begging bowls to OFAC, the Treasury Secretary and Rubio, to beg for permission to embark on actions consistent with our sole sovereign legal right? Rubio will go. So will his former heckler Donald Trump. By November 2028, they will both be out. Any government elected into office in 2025 in Trinidad and Tobago will be there, saving revolt, in 2030. The solution to Dragon is not to beg, pander, accept your humiliation with good grace, but to wait. Lay our incontestable legal and economic case on the OFAC table. Wait and engage in creative tension with Little Marco.