MIAMI, Sept. 19 (UPI) -- Cuba could be on the verge of solving its energy woes and perhaps even one day join the ranks of the world's oil-producing elite, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez suggested somewhat wryly during a recent world leaders summit in Havana.
Speaking at least week's Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Havana, Chavez told reporters that Cuba's potentially lucrative offshore oil reserves could one day catapult the island onto the world petroleum stage and maybe even earn the country a place in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
"Fidel is headed for OPEC," said Chavez jokingly during the meeting drawing representatives from 118 countries and more than 50 world leaders. "He is finding oil."
Though it seems unlikely that Cuba would be invited into OPEC based solely on speculation about what might reside beneath its ocean floors, there are indications that its offshore deposits are the world's next great untapped source of oil.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, some 4.6 billion barrels of crude oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas just may well be lurking below of the ocean floor of the Northern Cuban basin. The reserves are said to possibly rival the estimated reserves in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
That kind of crude would more than meet Cuba's daily oil intake -- about 205,000 bpd -- and provide enough excess to transform the country from being dependent on Chavez's largesse to a global player on the oil market.
Several nations are already banking on Cuba'a oil potential. China has invested an estimated $1 billion in Cuba with the intention of exploring its offshore deposits. Last week, India's state-run oil company penned a deal with Cuba to explore off shore as well.
Some analysts are skeptical about the hype surrounding the supposed untapped oil wealth that could springboard Cuba from impoverished communist state to self-sufficiency and financial windfall.
"Cuba's oil potential is just that, potential," Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs think tank, told United Press International.
He noted that senior Cuban officials are often reluctant to speak out about the potential deposits until there is further proof regarding their size. Others share the COHA director's skepticism.
"It's been a big smoke screen for a long time ... the Soviets used to say there were large deposits off the shores of Cuba, though it hasn't been proven," Maurcio Claver-Carone, a member of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee, told UPI recently.
Claver-Carone also contends that Cuban leader Fidel Castro used the basin as a means of promoting foreign investment in Cubapetroleo, Cuba's state-owned oil company.
Meanwhile, some U.S. lawmakers, lured by the idea of a bountiful oil supply so near American shores, have proposed waiving the decades-long embargo against Cuba to allow U.S. oil companies to bid on extraction projects.
Among them is Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, who earlier this year introduced a bill that would lift the Cuban embargo and allow U.S. companies to do business with Cubapetroleo.
The senator argues that while U.S. firms are prohibited from doing business with Castro, and from exploring fields off the shores of southern Florida due to environmental restrictions, Cuba is already planning its own offshore exploration and cultivating ties with countries such as China.
Cuba is only 90 miles from the United States at its closest part. An agreement brokered in 1977 splits the waters between the two nations in half. The United States does not permit drilling on its half, though Castro is reportedly eager to explore Cuban waters.
"The bottom line is that Cuba will develop its oil fields within 45 miles of our shore. We can sit by and complain, only to watch rigs go out and start extracting oil, or we get involved," Craig told UPI in June.
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