The US attack on Venezuela has halted vital oil shipments to Cuba as a tightening US embargo is strangling the island’s economy. Lack of fuel is collapsing the energy grid, halting all but essential transport and threatens to destroy the vital tourism industry. Cubans are resilient, but can they survive this crisis?
Tensions in Cuba have reached an all-time high. As fuel imports have ground to a halt, the small island nation has been plunged into a new era of crisis, with a collapsing electricity grid, barebones public transport system, and hospitals reaching breaking point. Scenes of household waste piling high in residential neighbourhoods have become commonplace in Havana, as cuts to refuse collection services fail to meet demand, whilst millions were left without electricity in early March as a power outage affected vast swathes of the island.
Though some commercial flights continue to operate, Canadian and Russian air carriers have announced plans to repatriate their citizens before suspending all flights until fuel shortages can be eased. The French national carrier, Air France, confirmed their own halting of operations on the 4th of March.
Even as the Cuban government has announced severe fuel rationing measures and the imposition of strict limits on the functioning of public services, it finds itself the latest target of the Trump administration’s vindictive approach to foreign affairs, which in the past few months have only witnessed sustained and abrasive escalation. For many Cubans, it seems, there is no end in sight.
‘Failing Nation’ or ‘Threat’?
On 29 January, US President Donald Trump announced a ‘national emergency’ regarding the United States’ approach to Cuba, stating that its Caribbean neighbour was a ‘failing nation’ that constituted ‘an unusual and extraordinary threat’ to US interests and national security. The ensuing executive order threatened tariffs on any country that dares to provide oil, diesel, or any type of fuel substance to the country, which had previously received around 60 per cent of its fuel from abroad.
Since the United States imposed its embargo on Cuba in 1962, freezing Cuban assets in the US, prohibiting Cuban exports to their nearest neighbour, and restricted freedom of movement for US nationals entering the island, Cubans have known little respite from the stranglehold of trade and travel restrictions that have been wielded over them for over sixty years.
However, this new development in foreign states’ ability to supply fuel has reignited fears of American-backed regime change. ‘I think we would like to see the regime there change,’ stated US Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, the day before the new tariffs were announced. ‘That doesn’t mean that we’re going to make a change,’ he clarified, seeming to rule out military intervention, ‘but we would love to see a change.’ Unlike the threats of invasion made earlier this year to NATO-ally Denmark over Greenland, Washington’s Cuba strategy seems to prefer icing out the island nation to a full-on firefight.
Rumours have also circulated in recent weeks of Rubio engaging in talks with high-level Cuban officials – including Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of former president Raúl Castro. Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, later confirmed that talks have taken place, ‘aimed at finding solutions through dialogue to the bilateral differences we have between the two nations’.
However, as Trump suggested that the US would not rule out a ‘friendly takeover’ of the neighbouring nation, Díaz-Canell affirmed in a post on X that Cuba would ‘defend itself with determination and strength against any terrorist and mercenary aggression that tries to affect its national sovereignty and stability.’
Other countries in the region have also voiced their concern with the blockade. Speaking at the recent regional CARICOM summit, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness warned that a ‘prolonged crisis in Cuba [would] not remain confined to Cuba’, instead affecting ‘migration, security and economic stability across the Caribbean basin.’ Yet, Rubio, also present at the summit, rejected claims that the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Cuba was the responsibility of the US. ‘Cuba needs to change’, Rubio reiterated. ‘This is the worst economic climate Cuba has faced. And it is the authorities there, and that government, who are responsible for that.’
Our Man in Miami
Rubio, himself the son of Cuban immigrants, has a particular bone to pick with Cuba’s communist-run government. Though his parents left the country during the US-backed Fulgencia Batista dictatorship (Rubio’s early claims that they were exiled following the 1959 Revolution were debunked in 2011 by The Washington Post), he has built much of his political career appealing to strong anti-Castroist sentiment.
This is no surprise among Cuba’s significant US diaspora, much of which is concentrated in Rubio’s home state of Florida. According to one poll by Florida International University, an overwhelming number (68 per cent) of Cuban Americans voted for Trump during the 2024 election, many citing his hardline stance on the future of the island.
Speaking to El País, director of the Cuban Research Institute and University of Florida professorJorge Duany noted the ‘dominant tendency towards conservatism’ within the Cuban-American community, with ‘a very clear affiliation with the Republican Party and [Trump].’ Thanks to the Cuban Adjustment Act, which facilitates easier routes to permanent residency and US citizenship, the Cuban-American community has historically been cast under a different legal framework to other Latin American diasporas living in the United States – something that, University of Miami professor and author Michael Bustamante believes might insulate many of them from Trump’s aggressively anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Successive waves of migration have led to this moment. When Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement took power in 1959, many Cubans fled alongside Batista’s regime; ensuing waves of migration such as the so-called ‘Freedom Flights’ from 1965 to 1973, as well as the Mariel Exodus of 1980, ensured a steady flow of hundreds of thousands of Cubans out of the island.
Following the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Cubans left the island in the face of economic collapse during the so-called ‘Special Period’. While the normalization of US-Cuban relations under the Obama presidency during the so-called ‘Cuban thaw’ allowed for some reprieve, this was quickly reversed during the first Trump presidency.
In 2021, Cuba was relegated, alongside states like Somalia, Iran and North Korea, to the US government’s ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ list, a decision which led over 200 foreign banks and financial institutions to cut ties with the country. Although the Biden administration adopted a slightly softer approach to Cuba in the final months of its term, US Democrats did little to loosen the embargo, citing concerns over human rights abuses against anti-government protestors. When Trump ascended to the presidency a second time, many Cuban voters cited the GOP’s stance on foreign policy and the Democratic Party’s perceived move to the Left as motivation for Florida’s ‘red wave’.
Now ICE is coming for us
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has come under fire by members of the Cuban-American community as it has ramped up deportations since coming into office. ‘We didn’t deport people to Cuba on a regular basis before,’ remarked Abel Delgado, the head of Miami-Dade County’s Democratic Hispanic Caucus in an interview with NPR.
Last year, Florida Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar also stated on social media site X that she was ‘fully aware, and heartbroken, about the uncertainty now gripping Florida’s 27th District because of the recent immigration actions of the Administration.’ As Cubans continue to be deported in record numbers, with the US government pausing all Cuban immigration cases, rejecting visa applications, and ending family reunification programs, Trump’s treatment of his Cuban-American voter base appears to be erratic, if not downright illogical.
Any analysis of Cubans and Cuban-Americans alike must accept that islanders and diaspora alike are hardly a monolith. Voters within the latter are ‘very diverse’, Duany insists, ‘to the extent that the community is also diverse, […] in terms of its composition by age, gender, year of arrival in the United States, social class, race, place of residence.’
Many have cited the US Democratic Party’s reluctance to engage directly with Hispanic communities in red states such as Florida as reason for their failure to win votes. Speaking with Mother Jones, political analyst Fernand Amandi affirmed that Democrats had ‘abandoned the battlefield when it [came] to the constant, one-on-one engagement necessary to define the Democratic brand with Cuban voters’, doubtless ensuring that the community remains overwhelmingly Republican.
An Old World Order
Trump’s change of tack on Cuba hardly came as a surprise following the United States’s blatant bombing of Caracas, which resulted in the extraction of President Nicolás Maduro, heavy damage to military and civilian infrastructure, and an official death toll of at least 83 fatalities. This number included 32 Cuban nationals, all members of the country’s armed forces and intelligence services, who had reportedly been assigned to Maduro’s personal security detail.
Since the ascension of Hugo Chávez to the Venezuelan presidency in the 1990s, ties between Venezuela and Cuba have been essential to the latter’s survival: subsidized oil imports have been sent from Venezuela since the early 2000s, with around 35,000 barrels of oil a day reaching Cuba until Maduro’s capture on the 3 January. In exchange, Cuba’s ‘oil for doctors’ programme provided its South American neighbour with a steady stream of medical personnel, ensuring long-term cooperation between the two countries.
However, Delcy Rodríguez’s interim government has demonstrated a willingness to cede to US demands, recently signing a reform bill that opens Venezuela’s oil sector to foreign investment, and silently halting all oil exports to Cuba – a devastating blow to the island’s fragile economy.
Trump’s self-proclaimed ‘Donroe doctrine’ is hardly reminiscent of a new world order. It models itself as a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the infamous Monroe doctrine, a key tenet of US foreign policy that has opposed any sort of foreign intervention – in politics, armaments or trade – in the Americas since the nineteenth century.
Monroe was notably invoked during the Cold War when Cuba gained crucial support from the Soviet Union in its establishment of a communist state, leading the US to mount several attacks and clandestine operations in the dogged hope of destabilizing the country and removing its leadership. Cuba, long a beacon of the global Left, has shown extraordinary resilience in weathered the attacks lobbed from just across the Florida Straits for over sixty years.
Now, however, after the relative impunity granted to Trump’s threats and interventions in Greenland, Venezuela, and Iran in 2026 alone, it is not clear whether Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach will succeed in Cuba.
The Donroe Doctrine seeks to ‘deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere’, states the White House’s National Security Strategy, published in November 2025. With the stated aim of promoting the dominance of American-made goods, services, and technologies around the world, as well as readjusting the US’s ‘global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere’, it leaves little doubt as to what the Trump administration wants in regard to Cuba.
For the Cuban population, the Trump administration’s obsession with its Hemispheric neighbours comes at immense cost. The fuel crisis has hit vulnerable sectors of the population the worst, including pregnant women and child cancer patients, according to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party’s official newspaper, Granma, while Díaz-Canel has called the US’s tariffs an ‘attempt at genocide’.
Everyday activities like travelling to school or work have become a challenge, as petrol- or diesel-consuming vehicles, including buses, are off the road. Those who have the money can pay for a cycle rickshaw or horse-drawn cart, but many have been resigned to make often-tiring journeys on foot. Speaking to the Diario de Cuba, an unnamed student in the eastern province of Guantánamo lamented the absence of public transport, cars, or gasoline in the municipality, with him and his classmates being denied ‘the opportunity to arrive on time for classes’.
The crisis has also crippled Cuba’s taxi industry, a key tourist attraction. One driver, Reymundo Aldamada, reported to the online news site CiberCuba that he had been forced to lower his rates from 50 dollars per journey to as low as 20 or 25: ‘the day that the gasoline runs out’, he stated, he and other taxi drivers would have ‘no option’ but to stop driving.
Uncertainty for Latin America’s Left
Several countries have announced their commitments to providing Cuba humanitarian aid. Mexico, which had previously supplied Cuba with an average of 17,200 barrels of oil a day, sent two cargo ships from the Port of Veracruz on 8 February carrying goods such as rice, meat, fish, powdered milk, vegetable oil, and personal hygiene products. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum also assured that, as of 12 February, at least 1,500 tonnes of powdered milk and beans were still waiting to be delivered.
Chile’s outgoing president Gabriel Boric also promised to send US$1 million to finance humanitarian projects in Cuba via the ‘Chile Against Hunger and Poverty’ fund, which is due to be delivered through a United Nations program on the ground. It is unclear whether was paid before the 11 March hand-over to José Antonio Kast, who will certainly cancel all forms of support for Cuba.
Spain, too, promised to send aid in the form of food and first aid products, after Spanish diplomat José Manuel Albares met in Madrid with Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who also visited Russia, China and Vietnam in February in a quest for international support. Nevertheless, Cuba has had little luck in convincing allies to defy the US blockade.
Rumours have surfaced of foreign tankers attempting to break the blockade, with an unconfirmed number of at least nine ships being seized or diverted, accused of transporting sanctioned oil. A Hong Kong-flagged carrier with a reported 200,000 barrels of Russian gasoil onboard had set sail for Cuba until early March, when reports surfaced that it had purportedly changed course.
The ‘Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba’, a grassroots effort organized by an international coalition of social movements, unions, and humanitarian groups, has also received support from climate activist Greta Thunberg after announcing its intention to reach the island nation. Modelling itself after the Global Sumud flotilla, which mounted various attempts to break the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip in 2025, the convoy plans to set off in March to deliver food, medicine, and energy supplies such as batteries and solar-powered chargers.
What does Cuba’s current crisis mean for Latin America as a whole? Trump’s outspoken support for the Latin American Right was reiterated last week when he invited his Latin American allies, including the presidents of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Costa Rica, to the 2026 ‘Shield of the Americas Summit’. Trump’s commitment to providing Argentina with a $20 billion bailout on the condition of Javier Milei’s success in October’s midterm elections was held by many to have cinched his landslide win; similarly, recent elections in Honduras have suffered accusations of electoral fraud and US interference with the win of far-right candidate Nasry Asfura, who was praised by Trump online just before voting opened. Washington seems unlikely to loosen its grip on Latin American politics any time soon.
What’s Next?
Since anti-government protests exploded in 2021, an estimated one million people have jumped ship from Cuba’s spiraling political and economic crisis. A 2024 report by the United Nations’ Economic and Social Affairs department estimated that by the end of the 21st century the island’s population could amount to little less than 6 million, while key economic sectors like agriculture and tourism either stagnate or plummet. Though remittances sent from family members abroad are technically exempt from US sanctions, they have been hindered by the Washington-driven withdrawal of remittance service Western Union in February 2025, leaving many families dependent on salaries and state pensions decimated by regular devaluations of the national currency.
Even before the current energy crisis, a crippled economy and heightened political repression were testing Cuba’s communist utopia. With a GDP already down by 15 per cent in the last half a decade, Cuba has seen at least 20 per cent of its population emigrate in the same period amid immense hyperinflation and a steadily worsening post-COVID health sector. In October 2024, the UN General Assembly continued its almost thirty-year tradition of overwhelmingly voting to call for an end to the embargo, with only the United States and Israel voting ‘against’. In February, UN Human Rights spokesperson Marta Hurtado reiterated the organisation’s preoccupations regarding ‘Cuba’s deepening socio-economic crisis’, citing its subjection to a ‘decades-long financial and trade embargo’ and ‘extreme weather events’ before the current blockade. Though the US continues to blame the Cuban government for the current situation, it is clear that a nation with a boot on its neck, has little room for manoeuvre.
While the world watches and does little, it is the ordinary Cuban people who are bearing the brunt of the damage. ‘Somehow the opinions of Cubans in the island, the voices of those who are living the reality and who will be affected directly by any changes, are the last to be considered in conversations about Cuba’, states Librada González Fernández, founder of Archivo Cubanecuir, an organisation dedicated to preserving queer Cuban history. ‘Between reactionary Cuban-Americans calling for an accelerated collapse in the island and foreign leftists willing to mute any voice that contradicts their fairytale about the Revolution,’ she continues, ‘there is very little space for Cubans in Cuba to actually advocate for themselves.’
Cuba’s survival will likely depend on its capacity to either negotiate with the United States or somehow sway its allies into breaking the siege. The dire state of the country’s energy supply has already resulted in the population improvising to survive: some small private businesses have been allowed to break the Cuban government’s monopoly on oil imports by receiving fuel directly from their own sources, a move that has been encouraged by the US government in order to legitimize Cuba’s emerging private sector. As workers are furloughed, failing transport links threaten to prevent agricultural produce from reaching urban centres, and hotels continue to pause or outright close their operations, the question of how long the Cuban government can hold its course has never been more under threat. The future seems as uncertain as ever, but the age-old question remains the same: is this just another tropical storm to be weathered, or does it finally spell the end for Castro’s battered, revolutionary dream?
