Cuba Goes Dark
The US oil blockade is pushing Cuba to a breaking point
For three months, Cuba has received no oil. The island’s power grid has collapsed into rolling blackouts lasting up to 20 hours. Hospitals are postponing surgeries. Garbage rots on Havana’s streets.
President Donald Trump, surveying the wreckage his administration helped create, declared casually to reporters at the White House last week that he expects to have “the honor of taking Cuba.”
That statement captures the strategic gamble now unfolding 90 miles off the Florida coast. Washington has imposed what amounts to a wartime oil blockade on a nation of 10 million people, betting that economic collapse will produce the political capitulation that six decades of sanctions and covert action, and even a military invasion, could not.
Whether it works — and at what human cost — may become the defining Western Hemisphere foreign policy question of Trump’s second term.
A familiar goal, a different method
Since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, US policy toward Cuba has been driven by a consistent, if often unsuccessful, goal: forcing change in a government that Washington has long viewed as hostile, illegitimate, and dangerously close to its shores.
In the early years, that effort was direct. The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 was a failed attempt to overthrow Castro outright. Assassination plots followed. When those efforts collapsed, the strategy shifted toward something more gradual but no less ambitious: economic pressure.
The embargo, imposed in the early 1960s, was never simply punitive. Internal US documents at the time made clear the intention was to create “hunger, desperation, and the overthrow” of Cuba’s government. In practice, it evolved into a sweeping web of restrictions — banning most trade and financial transactions, limiting travel, cutting Cuba off from US banks and credit markets, and penalizing third-country companies that do business with the island. Over time, that logic hardened into policy orthodoxy: isolate Cuba, restrict its access to capital and trade, and wait for the system to weaken or fracture.
In 1996, the Helms-Burton Act codified this approach as law, tightening sanctions and making it significantly harder for any future president to unwind them without congressional approval. It also extended the reach of US penalties beyond Cuba itself, targeting foreign companies doing business on the island.
The impact was real but uneven. The Cuban economy stagnated, heavily dependent on external patrons — first the Soviet Union, later Venezuela — and on remittances from families in the United States, a lifeline for ordinary Cubans whose basic needs the state could not provide.
The Cuban government says the embargo has cost the island more than $200 billion in inflation-adjusted losses — a number it reports each year to the United Nations, where more conservative estimates have put the figure closer to $130 billion. The exact total is debated, but not the underlying reality: decades of restrictions have weighed heavily on Cuba’s economy.
At the same time, the policy drew sustained international opposition, with UN member states voting to condemn the embargo for 33 consecutive years. Most US allies in Europe, Canada, and Latin America maintained diplomatic and trade ties with Havana.
The Obama opening — and the reversal
Barack Obama broke from the US policy consensus. In 2014, his administration moved to normalize relations, reopening diplomatic ties, easing travel restrictions, and allowing limited commercial engagement. The theory was that isolating Cuba had not worked — and that opening Cuba to American tourists, businesses, and ideas might gradually reshape the system from within. Ricardo Zúniga, who was part of Obama’s negotiating team, described the logic: the objective was to “alleviate the suffering of the Cuban people and let them solve some of their own problems.”
For a brief period, that approach showed signs of life. Tourism increased. Small private businesses expanded. But the Cuban bureaucracy was slow to adapt to the influx of American tourists and new private licensing arrangements. And Havana made clear that while it was willing to discuss practical bilateral matters — immigration enforcement, counternarcotics cooperation — the structure of the state itself was not up for negotiation.
Trump dismantled much of the opening President Obama pursued with Cuba, redesignating the country as a state sponsor of terrorism, restoring travel and financial restrictions, and reasserting pressure as the organizing principle of US policy — though diplomatic relations remained intact. Joe Biden, despite early expectations to the contrary, largely left those measures in place, restoring only modest relief near the end of his term: limited tweaks on remittances, travel, and migration rather than any broad shift in policy. Trump reversed even those changes on his first day back in office in January 2025.
A pressure point inside the system
Rather than relying on broad sanctions alone, the Trump administration has targeted a specific vulnerability: energy. By cutting off Venezuela’s oil shipments and warning other countries against stepping in, Washington is choking off the fuel that powers Cuba’s electricity grid and much of its economy.
The consequences have been immediate and severe. Cuba’s grid — already fragile, running largely on oil-fired power plants — has buckled under the strain. The island has endured repeated nationwide blackouts, including a recent grid collapse that left much of the country without electricity. Water systems are faltering, food is spoiling, and public transportation has broken down.
CNN’s Havana bureau chief, Patrick Oppmann, described the daily reality: filling a car with gasoline, if you could find any, would cost around $300 — more than a typical Cuban worker earns in an entire year on a state salary.
The crisis has reached the US embassy. Cuba’s foreign ministry refused an American request to import diesel for the embassy’s generators, calling the ask “shameless” given the blockade Washington has imposed on the rest of the island.
Protests — rare in a country where dissent carries serious legal risk and the government has historically responded with mass arrests — have broken out in several cities and at times turned violent. In the central city of Morón, demonstrators partially destroyed the local Communist Party headquarters. Human Rights Watch has warned the crisis is pushing essential services “to the limit,” and the United Nations has cautioned that Cuba could “collapse” under sustained pressure.
Cuban officials are not disputing the severity of the situation. “Pain is there, have no doubt,” Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío told Meet the Press on Sunday, acknowledging the strain on the population even as he pushed back against the idea that the country is on the verge of collapse.
What Washington wants
At the center of the current US approach is President Miguel Díaz-Canel. American officials reportedly see his ouster as a necessary step toward any broader deal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been particularly blunt, saying last week that Cuba’s system “doesn’t work” and that “they have to get new people in charge.”
Rather than pushing for wholesale regime change, Washington appears to be seeking something narrower: the departure of Díaz-Canel, coupled with economic concessions — opening parts of the Cuban economy to foreign investment, including from US companies and the Cuban diaspora — and possibly the release of political prisoners. The approach mirrors what the administration pursued in Venezuela earlier this year — targeting the head of state while leaving much of the underlying system intact.
From the US perspective, that would constitute a meaningful shift without the risks of dismantling the entire system. From Cuba’s perspective, it is a nonstarter.
The line Havana won’t cross
Cuban officials have been unequivocal that leadership and political structure are not up for negotiation. “The nature of the Cuban government, the structure of the Cuban government, and the members of the Cuban government are not part of the negotiation,” Fernández de Cossío said Sunday. Regime change is “absolutely” off the table.
That stance reflects more than a defense of Díaz-Canel himself. As Cuba’s first president since 1959 not surnamed “Castro,” he occupies a role that is symbolically important, but real authority remains distributed across the Communist Party, the military, and state-linked economic networks. The back-channel negotiations with Washington run not through him but through Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a 41-year-old grandson of the still-influential 94-year-old Raúl Castro.
If Díaz-Canel is not indispensable, his removal could be framed as a manageable concession. But agreeing to that change under pressure would risk establishing a precedent that Cuban leaders have resisted for more than half a century — allowing the United States to shape internal political outcomes.
Rubio’s strategy
The confrontation with Cuba is part of a broader regional posture that has become more assertive under President Trump. The administration has framed its Western Hemisphere policy as a campaign to restore American dominance and clear the region of leftist governments — backing right-wing allies, threatening tariffs and sanctions against uncooperative neighbors, and demonstrating through Venezuela that military force is available to deal with those who resist.
Marco Rubio’s influence on Cuba policy is hard to overstate. The son of Cuban immigrants who fled before Castro’s revolution, he built his political career in South Florida’s exile community — a powerful voting bloc that has long demanded a hard line toward Havana. As a US senator, he spent years arguing that engagement with the regime only prolonged its life, and he developed a theory linking Cuba’s fate directly to Venezuela’s.
Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela had become Cuba’s economic lifeline, supplying tens of thousands of barrels of discounted oil per day in exchange for Cuban military advisers and intelligence officers. Rubio’s argument was simple: take away Venezuela, and Cuba’s model collapses.
“Anything that’s bad for a communist dictatorship is something I support,” he told NPR in 2019, adding that a weakened Cuba would be a welcome “byproduct” of removing Venezuela’s leader.
In January, US special forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a raid on his Caracas compound. Maduro’s former deputy agreed to halt oil shipments to Cuba and open Venezuela’s oil sector to foreign companies. The scenario Rubio had long promoted was now a reality.
What it means for America
For Americans, the stakes extend beyond Cuba itself. If the strategy succeeds, it could create new opportunities for US businesses and potentially reduce migration pressures, which have surged in recent years.
But the risks are just as real. A deepening humanitarian crisis could trigger new waves of migration — a collapse could produce a refugee crisis that analysts say would dwarf the Mariel boatlift of 1980, in which roughly 125,000 Cubans fled to the United States over five months.
And while US officials have downplayed the likelihood of military action, the rhetoric on both sides has introduced a new level of tension. Cuban officials, while emphasizing that they do not expect conflict, are preparing for the possibility. “Our military is always prepared,” Fernández de Cossío said, adding that it “is preparing these days for the possibility of military aggression.”
The question beneath the strategy
The logic of Washington’s current approach is clear enough: apply pressure where it hurts most, force a concession that can be framed as a political win, and open the door to a more economically integrated — and more compliant — Cuba.
Less clear is what comes after. If Díaz-Canel were to step aside, the underlying structure of power in Cuba would remain. And if pressure destabilizes the island without producing a clear political outcome, the consequences will not be contained to Cuba alone.
In addition to possibly triggering new waves of migration, a government collapse could deepen humanitarian strain on the Cuban people, empower hardline elements within the government, and create openings for external actors like Russia and China, longtime allies of the regime, to expand their influence. The Russian government is already talking to Cuba about providing aid, and until last week it appeared to be trying to send a tanker loaded with diesel fuel to the island (the ship eventually changed course and headed toward Trinidad).
Or a Cuban regime that refuses to make a deal with the US could collapse anyway — leaving a failed state just 90 miles from America’s shores.
Washington has found a way to squeeze Cuba at a moment of maximum vulnerability. But the strategy is built around creating leverage, not defining what comes next — and it offers no clear answer if the pressure works too well, or not enough.
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Disgraceful action from an allegedly ‘pro life’ president