TWO US legislators have called for a permanent end to their country’s decades-old blockade of Cuba after witnessing the effects of Washington’s energy embargo during an official visit to the socialist island.

House of Representatives members Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan Jackson, both Democrats, met Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez and MPs during a five-day stay that ended on Sunday.

Mr Diaz-Canel wrote on X on Monday that he had “denounced the criminal damage caused by the blockade, particularly the consequences of the energy embargo imposed by the current US administration and its threats of even more aggressive actions.”

He said: “I reiterated our government’s willingness to engage in serious and responsible bilateral dialogue and find solutions to our existing differences.”

Top-level talks are ongoing, but no details have been disclosed.

Ms Jayapal said she believes recent Cuban actions, such as opening the economy to certain investments by Cuban Americans living abroad, a pledge to pardon more than 2,000 prisoners and the arrival of an FBI team to help investigate a fatal shooting involving a US-flagged boat, “indicate that the moment is here for us to have a real negotiation between the two countries and to reverse the failed US policy of decades, a cold war remnant that no longer serves the American people or the Cuban people.”

In late January, US President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country supplying oil to Cuba, although a Russian ship reached the island last week with 730,000 barrels of crude without interference.

Oil shipments from Venezuela were halted after the US attacked it in early January and kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro.

The consequences for Cuba include power cuts, petrol shortages and rationing, a lack of public transport, cuts in working hours, paralysed hospitals and surgeries and suspension of flights.

“This is cruel collective punishment — effectively an economic bombing of the infrastructure of the country — that has produced permanent damage. It must stop immediately,” Ms Jayapal and Mr Jackson said in a statement published on Sunday.