Cuba has weathered a series of crises since 1960, periods of siege followed by adaptation and survival, with the ever-debilitating effects of draconian US trade sanctions. But the present crisis seems more grave, with Donald Trump seemingly intent on regime change.

As the Trump Administration proceeds to turn the screw even more on the besieged Cuban economy, deliberately making daily life hell for ordinary Cubans, we can only sit and watch as what Marco Rubio calls a ‘failed state’ struggles to resist in the midst of yet another crisis.

All revolutions are, by definition, prone to crisis, and Cuba’s has been no exception. However, while some of those past crises can be attributed to internal causes and decisions, the underlying cause of many, if not most, has been one constant element: the US embargo, started in 1960 and still operating.

Between those crises, the Revolution has had to cope with no fewer than three prolonged periods of what we might justifiably call ‘siege’, as US hostility has intensified the embargo over the decades. Today’s crisis is very much one of those periods, driven by the Trump Administration’s determination to finally remove the Revolution’s leadership through the deliberate impoverishment of the Cuban population.

Since January 2026, its vindictive drive to produce enough unrest to end the Cuban system has seen all oil imports halted (under what has been a real, and not rhetorical) naval blockade, coupled with the threat of sanctions on any country allowing oil into Cuba. That has left the island with less than half of the oil it needs to generate energy and run a national transport system. Blackouts are now more frequent and much longer than ever, wearing down morale every day, while the decline of transport reduces the internal shipment of food.

Meanwhile, imports of food and medicine have also been reduced drastically, and Cuba’s vital hard-currency earnings through tourism have dwindled, since foreign airlines and hotel chains steadily withdrew from Cuba in the face of Trump’s threats of targeted sanctions. In many respects, this ‘siege’ threatens to be the Revolution’s worst yet. So, what makes this one different?

The stages of siege

The first ‘siege’ ran from 1960, when Washington imposed its first, punitive, trade sanctions, alleging inadequate compensation for US refineries seized by the Cuban government. In 1963, it became a full embargo (tellingly, under the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act), with all American states, bar Mexico and Canada, also isolating Cuba. That isolation was partly mitigated by continued, but low-level, trade with Western Europe, and by a limited Soviet exchange of sugar for oil. But Cuba survived, largely thanks to widespread popular support for the Revolution’s deep social transformation, and successful mobilization to resist active US hostility from 1961.

The next siege came after the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet-led Socialist Bloc and its Comecon trading network, in which Cuba had participated and flourished from 1972. Within four years growth fell by some 35 per cent, and oil imports by a frightening 90 per cent, bringing transport and the whole economy close to collapse.

Simultaneously, the US seized what it perceived as an opportunity to end the Revolution by further tightening the embargo (1992, 1996). Demoralisation seemed widespread, many Cubans fearing the end. Yet again, however, the system survived, this time thanks to an emergency programme of hitherto unthinkable economic reforms, allowing hard currency, shifting from sugar to tourism, allowing (limited) self-employment, and breaking up state land to cooperatives. Meanwhile, more unseen contributions came from the rationing system and the thousands who voluntarily ensured the movement of supplies and steadily rebuilt the tattered state. By 1995, growth started to return, bringing back popular confidence, and also shifting the Revolution’s emphasis back to its nationalist roots and the importance of ideological commitment to something called ‘the Revolution’.

This time, while there are some ways in which the crisis seems less catastrophic materially (e.g. goods are much more visibly available and Cuba is no longer isolated diplomatically in the world), the drastic fuel shortage, compounded by price racketeering by legal and illegal private operators, has spectacularly inflated those goods’ prices, out of the reach of those without access to hard currency.

Meanwhile, Trump’s threats of punitive tariffs and/or sanctions have frightened off those trading with or investing in Cuba, especially in the tourism sector, on which Cuba has long depended; now, tourists arrive as a trickle, compared to the four million or so of 2019. Foreign banks and insurance companies have also been frightened off by Trump, leading them to operate the US embargo, often against the laws of their own home countries.

Combined, those developments have severely reduced Cuba’s ability to invest, trade or import freely, which of course also means reducing the quality of Cuba’s once praised health system, with the daily reminders in the shape of prolonged periods without energy to keep cool or fuel to travel or carry goods.

The net result is an ever more depressing and demoralizing vision of the future for many families, driving more young Cubans to emigrate (and the population to fall dangerously, by around a million in a few years), and leading to public expressions of disaffection and simple anger, often aimed at the Cuban government rather than the real source of the whole crisis, which continues to be the embargo.

Regime change

And beyond that picture of stress, decline and resignation lie the constantly repeated threats from Trump and Rubio to settle Cuba’s problems militarily. Although Rubio occasionally seems to oscillate between echoing Trump’s boastful threats and adopting a more conciliatory discourse, talking of a possible peaceful transition via economic reform, the reality remains that the Trump Administration intends ‘regime change’ one way or another.

Moreover, Trump of course has already proved more than capable of converting words into action if the mood takes him, regardless of international law, relations with supposed allies, or the financial or human costs of any such action. That is a reality of which all Cubans remain acutely aware: a genuine sword of Damocles poised above their heads, and in the hands of an unpredictable would-be invader.

That all makes the current crisis and siege seem somehow more threatening than either of the previous two, which Cuba ultimately overcame. And, of course, the country is now without the two leaders (Fidel and Raul Castro) who oversaw and rallied the resistance to, and survival from, those previous crises. That means now they are without the psychological context that notably helped sustain faith, confidence and willing commitment under siege. That also makes any predictions about the future of the Revolution unreliable and unwise, an uncertainty that is something that external observers and Cubans on the ground share. The latter, though, have to live that uncertainty daily, with all its costs – political, psychological and material.

Meanwhile, as before (but now with more foreboding), they often seem to seek a new normality, to enable them to cope with the stresses, and fall back on whatever psychological reserves they still have, individually and collectively.  This really is the test of those years of solidarity, collective ethos, and loyalty to ‘the Revolution’.

Main image: Trump, Marco Rubio (right), and CIA Director John Radcliffe monitor the Venezuela crisis 2025.

Antoni Kapcia is Emeritus Professor, University of Nottingham. He is an expert in contemporary Cuban history and politics, focusing on participation, the Party, the state, the political system and cultural politics, and author of A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba: Power, Authority and the State since 1959, Bloomsbury Academic 2020.