THE US IS STRANGLING CUBA. WHAT WILL HAPPEN NOW?

Foreword

Since January 2026, the US has been imposing a fuel blockade on Cuba, causing an ongoing fuel shortage and economic crisis. Cuba heavily depends on importing petroleum, particularly from nearby Venezuela and Mexico, to meet its energy needs.

Following the 2026 US intervention in Venezuela, in which US forces ousted president Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba were cut off, leaving the country without adequate supply.

The US is motivated by a desire for regime change in Cuba.

Current situation

The US began blocking oil tankers heading to Cuba in February 2026, targeting companies such as the Mexican state-owned Pemex [1] and threatening the responsible countries with tariffs should they resist. Trump subsequently said the US could implement a  takeover of Cuba.

The severe US-imposed oil and energy blockade left Cuba facing crippling fuel shortages and widespread power outages. On 14 May 2026, the Cuban Ministry of Energy and Mines warned that the country had run out of oil and diesel.

Background

Before 1959 US corporations owned the vast landed estates, the sugar mills, the railways, and the mining operations. The same applied to the banks, the buildings, and the hotels. It was a truly oppressive presence, rooted in direct American ownership of much of the country’s infrastructure.

The Cuban Revolution brought Fidel Castro into power in 1959, but the US organized the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in April 1961, consisting of Cuban exiles directly financed by the US. The operation took place at the height of the Cold War and its failure influenced relations between Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

We are at the height of the crisis triggered by the  installation of Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. The warning to US is clear: do not seek a rematch for the Bay of Pigs. According to the principles of deterrence, the Soviet missiles balance out the US Jupiter missiles deployed in Italy and Turkey, right along the Iron Curtain.

Fortunately, Moscow agrees to the secret compromise with Washington that will resolve the crisis: Kennedy promises not to invade the island and withdraws the Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy. In exchange, Khrushchev repatriates the missiles deployed in Cuba.

But the US has maintained an embargo on Cuba since 1962 after the Castro administration nationalized all US properties.

Anyway, the impact of the embargo became particularly consequential only after the collapse of the Soviet Union  in 1991, who supplied 70% of Cuba's imports.

This led to an economic crisis which improved in 1999 after Hugo Chávez was elected as president of Venezuela, and began to support the country with heavily subsidized oil shipments. In return, Cuba sent doctors and security personnel to Venezuela.

During the second Trump presidency in January 2025, the US government significantly tightened its economic sanctions against Cuba, orienting it around what it calls a "maximum pressure" strategy.

A 2026 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research stated that sanctions imposed on Cuba during Trump's first term were “likely the primary cause” for the increase in Cuba's infant mortality rate. Between 2018 and 2025, the rate increased 148%, from 4 to 9.9 per 1,000 live births.

This also coincided with increased sanctions by the Joe Biden administration. The report didn't cover the effects of the 2026 US fuel blockade but the authors speculated that it will likely have worsened the situation.

After the Venezuela intervention by the US that led to the capture of president Nicolás Maduro, Trump threatened potential military action towards multiple territories like Greenland, Colombia, Iran, and Cuba. On 29 January 2026, Trump authorized the imposition of additional tariffs on imports into the United States from countries that directly or indirectly supply oil to Cuba. Then the US confirmed that regime change in Cuba is a goal.

A military adventure against Cuba would be tough and demanding

Cubans are educated people, possessing a high level of consciousness and human, ethical, and even religious values deeply rooted in their history. It is a people with a high level of education and an almost genetic determination to defend their independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.

A military adventure against Cuba would be politically impracticable. It would cause massive bloodshed, and there would be no way to justify such a crime. Whoever gave the order to attack Cuba would become a war criminal: a criminal against humanity.

And it would not be viable, because the goal of exerting domination over Cuba - or establishing transition phases, controlling the economy, and so on - would not work.

Many Cubans would lose their lives, and the damage would be catastrophic. Many young Americans would also lose their lives, having been sent to fight a war that is not their own.
It would be a bloodbath. The damage to Cuba would be extreme, but the damage to the United States would also be significant. First, there would be historical and ethical damage regarding human values; political damage; damage to international legality and security.

How could the destruction of the Cuban economy or the country itself possibly serve the national interest of the United States? What would they gain from uncontrolled waves of Cuban migrants: precisely the kind of element they have always viewed as a threat to their own security?

What would the United States gain from the destabilization of the Caribbean basin, the Gulf of Mexico, and vital trade and air routes; from the destabilization of neighbouring countries; and from the impact a war against Cuba would have on the states in the region?

The military threat is, therefore, utterly senseless. Cubans will defend the country. It will be a defence to the bitter end, whatever the consequences.

What if the United States decided to attack Cuba?

Cuba's system of national defence against  meteorological disasters has been lauded by the United Nations and the World Health Organization for minimizing casualties despite frequent extreme weather.

Now, Havana is seeking to apply a similar model to a different threat: a possible US military confrontation, as President Donald Trump's rhetoric towards Cuba is intensifying .

Everyone in Cuba is trained militarily and incorporated into the system of national defence as there have been a  surge in US surveillance flights off Cuba's coast in recent months and executive orders declaring Cuba a "significant threat" to US national security. And Trump has stated, plainly, that “Cuba is next”. A US military operation, therefore, could be imminent, analysts have said.

How the military option might unfold

Military planners have in recent weeks examined a range of options for possible action against the island, including an Army-led air assault involving thousands of US soldiers to be carried out by the 101st Airborne Division, the only unit trained for such a task.

Any operation against Cuba would confront the Pentagon with a significant problem because much of the US military's attention and some of its most valuable offensive capabilities are already committed elsewhere.

The Pentagon has shifted aircraft, intelligence assets and other resources from other geographical regions to the Middle East to sustain operations against Iran.

Hegseth, the Secretary of War,  urged a more confrontational approach to Iran, despite reservations voiced by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leaving the president increasingly dissatisfied as the military campaign has become more protracted and complicated than originally anticipated when the war began back in February.

Over the course of the US-Israel-led war against Iran,  Trump has been irritated by both Hegseth and Caine when they raised the limitations of military operations.

Anyway, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said the president "has been extraordinarily proud" of Hegseth  leadership throughout Operation Epic Fury, which completely destroyed Iran's ballistic missiles, production facilities, navy, air defences, and more.

But Cuba has presented new security challenges. CBS News previously reported that Cuba had acquired attack drones of unknown origin. During a June 10 visit to the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay (in Cuba soil), Hegseth indirectly acknowledged the possibility of a threat to that installation. "It would be unwise for the government of Cuba to try to procure or get access to the types of weapons that could reach this base or the American home.”

Cuba and Gaza

The blockade has always been genocidal in nature, as it has always been rooted in the intent to harm a specific group of people - the Cuban people - and to subject them to living conditions that endanger their very existence. Genocide is already taking place in Gaza, committed by the Zionist government of Israel but shielded by the impunity guaranteed by the US government.

There are over a hundred Palestinian medical students in Cuba. These young men and women, in tears, insistently asked to return to Palestine at the onset of the most brutal phase of the war against the Palestinian people. Ultimately, they understood that their greatest contribution to the Palestinian cause would have to come later, once they had completed their medical studies.

From the genocide against Gaza, just as from the genocide against Cuba, broad international coalitions must emerge and develop on the simple fact that a superpower cannot act to destroy a small nation with impunity while the world looks on and allows it. And this is not merely a matter of values; what is at stake is the very survival of the international order that emerged from the Second World War.

Cuba - this small, rebellious, mysterious, mystical, and symbolic island - has today become a meeting point, a fulcrum upon which the fate of the world order might be decided. For if the United States were permitted to do to Cuba something akin to what happened in Gaza, what would come next?

The US has failed

America has failed. First and foremost, in the battle of narratives: a decisive factor in today’s hyper-mediated world. It is a case of "soft power cubed": the very force that once guaranteed its hegemony has now become the nemesis of that past dominance.

It is a self-inflicted wound by a Goliath who inflicts unspeakable and gratuitous suffering upon David. When Trump pushes the blockade against the Cuban people to a fever pitch he aids the Castroist cause rather than his own. He exposes his country to accusations of vile, cruel imperialism. It is a moral defeat of the kind that time rarely erodes, and often amplifies.

Cuba may be small, but its image looms large enough to dent the reputation of the Stars-and-Stripes Goliath: a reputation further tarnished by its brotherhood with genocidal Israel.

The other dimension of this failure is geopolitical. To illustrate it, we must look to the medium-to-long term: that past which permeates the present and invites us to imagine future outcomes.

Cuba is the reef upon which Trump's dream of establishing absolute US dominance over its own Sea shattered. That home sea - originally a mere basin, but transformed into a mid-oceanic expanse in 1914 by the opening of the Panama Canal, remains outside Washington’s full control.

The path toward controlling the Western Hemisphere is arduous and rocky notwithstanding  his spectacular renaming initiatives such as the "Gulf of America” and "Lake of America". For the empire, a "Red Cuba" represents an unforgivable anomaly.

In strategic and symbolic terms, Cuba’s significance to the United States is comparable to that of Taiwan to China: with its tenuous ties to China and Russia remains the "unfinished business" preventing the United States from fully establishing itself as the empire of North America.

From Eisenhower and Kennedy to Trump and Rubio: the same old story

The policy of what UN experts have called “energy starvation” is wreaking devastation on Cuba's public health system, affecting crucial medicines, medical device components and, above all, the fuel required to power hospital facilities.

Health workers have had to manually ventilate newborns by squeezing air into their breathing tubes as they wait for backup generators to start functioning during power outages.

The production and exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the Cuban population with lethal intent were envisaged even before John F. Kennedy issued a presidential proclamation stopping all trade with Cuba in February 1962.

In a secret memo penned in April 1960, Eisenhower’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Lester D. Mallory, exploring strategies to crush a socialist revolution 90 miles away from the Florida coastline, proposed that,  given majority support for Fidel Castro,  the only way “of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

To that end,  “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba … denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have built on the legal, political and ideological infrastructure of over six decades of economic warfare against Cuba with the widely advertised aim of bringing the Cuban state to breaking point. While continuities with the past should not be downplayed, it is also important to understand the novelty of the present moment.

While electoral autocracy seems to be the simplest method, the Trump administration is happy to revive the belligerent model of Grenada’s 1983 invasion or Panama’s in 1989. No secret has been made of the wish to apply this model to Cuba as well.

Capitalism - not the implementation of a market system as much as the possibility for unbridled plunder and gain for those aligned with the Trump administration - is at the heart of the siege, which operates as a tool of imperial extortion.

Trump has made no secret that he would like to build the first hotel after the fall of Castroism. It doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that Cuba before the revolution, the kind of paradise of plunder depicted in The Godfather Part II, is as close to Trump’s utopia as one could imagine.

UN experts condemn new US sanctions as humanitarian crisis deepens

On 06 August 2026 UN human rights experts condemned recent measures by the US against Cuba denouncing them as an attempt to alter the constitutional order of a sovereign State through threats and coercion.

They urged the international community and civil society to act swiftly to prevent a “silent Gaza” from unfolding on the island, as recently invoked by four members of the US Congress during their visit to Cuba.

“The humanitarian consequences are already unfolding into a full-blown crisis, threatening the rights to health, to life, to food and to development,” the experts said, following reports that uncollected waste is accumulating in parts of Havana, deepening the serious risk of diseases spreading.

UN agencies in Cuba have warned of mounting risks of food insecurity and shortages of medicines and basic necessities, with repeated national grid collapses and prolonged blackouts disrupting health care services and causing critical shortages of medicines and cancer-treatment capacity.

"Food must never be used as an instrument of political pressure. Measures that knowingly deprive a population of the means to survive strike at the most basic guarantees of the rights to life and diminish the core of human dignity," the experts said.

The experts stressed that the US’s unlawful unilateral coercive measures against Cuba contravene Article 2 of the UN Charter, and form part of a broader regime-change strategy encompassing the decades-long embargo on Cuba.

“The US Government must cease all threats and hostile acts against Cuba's sovereignty and revoke all measures it has imposed on the country that stand contrary to international law,” said the experts

“The Security Council and General Assembly should urgently address these threats as a matter of international peace and security,” they added.

Considerations

Secretary of State Marco Rubio built his career through the right-wing Cuban American political machine in Florida.  With Trump effectively outsourcing policy-making to his coterie of aides, Rubio’s obsession with “finishing the job” of rolling back the Cuban revolution may have become US policy.

But under Trump 2.0, something bigger than paying off a political constituency is at work, as the “Trump corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine in last year’s National Security Strategy indicated. The document is a throwback to the days when the US treated the Caribbean as a US lake and the Western hemisphere as its “backyard”.

The US’s pending defeat in its war against Iran probably won’t dissuade Trump from attacking Cuba or from attempting a “snatch and grab” of Raúl Castro akin to his military-led kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in January. Indeed, it’s quite possible that Trump would consider Cuba “low-hanging fruit” to distract from his fiasco in Iran.

But any sort of military adventure in Cuba would only make the current intolerable situation worse for the Cuban people. If a US assault created mass casualties, how would the injured be treated in hospitals that barely function now? Would a US attack create a refugee crisis as thousands attempt to flee the island to Florida? And how would US naval forces respond, given that preventing “destabilising migration” is one of the National Security Strategy’s aims?

Another unknown is how the Cuban people would respond to US aggression. The Cuban government claims that more than 1 million Cuban citizens are enrolled in paramilitary forces that could be mobilised to defend Cuban sovereignty.

Whatever pretences the US uses to justify intervention in Cuba, it has zero commitment to Cuban self-determination and zero care for the lives and living standards of the Cuban people. The US has no right to determine - or even have a say in - the Cuban people’s future. Only Cubans have that right.

Conclusion

The post-Cold War period created opportunities for US  normalization with Cuba but under the Trump administration (both Trump 1.0 and 2.0), these efforts have been derailed because the South Florida Cuban right remains a powerful constituency in the Republican Party.

The island remains a thorn in the US side in the Gulf of Mexico. Moreover, it acts as a catalyst for growing interest not only from China but also from a rising regional player: Mexico that is keeping Cuba alive by supplying the limited amount of oil reaching the Caribbean island, thereby defying potential reprisals from Washington.

At stake in the Mexican government's strategic vision are humanitarian and cultural issues, as well as national aspirations to assume a more significant role in the "American Mediterranean (Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea)”.