spill. We need to make it 'Key West safe'."

But Florida's powerful Cuban-American lobby has other ideas and with the 2012 presidential election looming, Barack Obama is in a difficult position.

Oil windfall?

The anti-Castro groups want the administration to take action to halt the drilling altogether and not just for safety reasons.

A major oil find would make this communist-run Caribbean island financially independent for the first time since the revolution in 1959.

For more than half a century Cuba has been dependent on the largesse of its ideological allies. First it was subsidised by the Soviet Union, then more recently Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, China.

Cuba has long produced some oil from a series of small onshore and coastal deposits.

image caption Cuba already has a small domestic oil industry

Tourists goingjust 10% American technology.

The rig was fitted in Singapore and the one piece of US equipment which was installed was the blow-out preventer.

It was the failure of BP's blow-out preventer which was at the heart of that disaster.

According to Lee Hunt, the Scarabeo 9 is a state of the art deep-water rig and there are six similar platforms built at the same Chinese shipyard currently operating in US waters.

For the moment environmental concerns appear to be taking precedence over politics.

The government will take up Repsol's offer to inspect Scarabeo 9 and a limited number of licences have been issued to US clean-up operators to enter Cuban waters and assist in the event of a spill.