This is John Batchel, comment by Professor Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College about how we do not have enough information on the incident off the Cuban coast, gunplay, four reported dead, many wounded, gunplay by what described as Cuban border guards. All the information comes from

Havana, from the Ministry of the Interior. No outside reporting. Much to learn about this.

Evan connects it to the crisis in Cuba in some fashion because they're out of oil to maintain the lights.

Here's heaven to explain.

What we don't know, what we do know, what happens next.

We need detail.

More of this tonight.

Well, John, this is probably one of those stories where, you know,

a little bit more information needs to come out about what the heck was going on.

The context for me, of course, really two things.

One, of course, you know, you've long had different groups in Cuba that are trying to do things under the radar to either help the Cubans or, you know, to run supplies and run contraband business

or alternatively evacuate Cubans from Cuba. And so, you know, it's not completely uncommon that

you have these one-off, two-off of, you know, boats given the, you know, relative short distances

between Miami, where this boat was registered in Cuba itself.

Having said that, probably the larger context, of course, is the economic crisis that Cuba

is in the fact that, you know, with the stopping of oil deliveries from Venezuela, from Russia,

and even now from Mexico, Cuba's already failing power grid, which

depended almost entirely on, on essentially petroleum-fired electricity. Now, without that

petroleum, Cuba produces about 40,000 barrels per day. They need 100,000 barrels a day just to keep

the lights on. So essentially, you've had these massive sometimes,

you know, 20, 22 hour a day blackouts, which you have, you know, Cuban streets paralyzed. So,

you know, without the trucks to, you know, bring food to the stores or get things to market,

...