The new oil blockade makes explicit what US policy has long denied — that economic warfare against Cuba targets civilians in the name of “regime change.”
This story was written in collaboration with Belly of the Beast, an independent media organization that covers Cuba and US–Cuba relations.
In 1960, then deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs Lester Mallory laid out the argument for waging economic war on Cuba. The US government, he wrote, should deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
Mallory also wrote that the United States should be “as adroit and inconspicuous as possible” in advancing this policy. If the end goal was to make the Cuban people so desperate they would rise up against their own government, then it would be prudent to conceal the true cause of their suffering. The Cuban government, not the US, would be blamed for the country’s economic problems.
This is the narrative that for decades hard-liner politicians in Washington and Miami have sold — and major media outlets have bought: “Sanctions don’t hurt ordinary Cubans. They only hurt the ‘regime,’” they say, adding that “scarcities are caused solely by the Cuban government’s economic mismanagement, not US policy.” More brazenly, they claim that “the United States isn’t waging economic war, and it’s not imposing a ‘blockade.’ Cuba is simply subject to a trade embargo.”
After Trump’s recent announcement of a de facto oil blockade on the island via executive order, US politicians and officials have dispensed with the euphemisms and abandoned the fiction that their policy is not intended to hurt ordinary people.
“It’s devastating to think about a mother’s hunger, a child who needs immediate help,” wrote Cuban American hard-liner Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) on X. “No one is indifferent to that pain. But that is precisely the brutal dilemma we face as exiles: to alleviate short-term suffering or to free Cuba forever.”
In Havana, Mike Hammer, the US chargé d’affaires to Cuba, reportedly told diplomats: “The Cubans have complained for years about ‘the blockade.’ . . . Now there is going to be a real blockade.” And for his part, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is openly calling for “regime change.”
The US embargo has always been collective punishment of the Cuban population. Now it’s no longer an open secret.
Collective Punishment
Some Democrats, to their credit, are finally calling a spade a spade.
“This Executive Order will kill countless innocent Cubans,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib on X. “Cuba poses no threat to the U.S. This is pure cruelty.”
“The goal is to crush the Cuban people, manufacture a humanitarian catastrophe, and force regime change at any cost,” wrote Rep. Ilhan Omar. “It is unconscionable and cruel.”
Rep. Chuy García said that the blockade “deliberately [starves] civilians” and that “Trump’s latest economic assault against the island is designed to cause a humanitarian collapse, deepening our collective punishment of the Cuban people and forcing more migration.”
In international law, “collective punishment” has a specific meaning: imposing penalties on an entire civilian population for the actions of its leaders — a practice explicitly prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
“Sanctions should be expected to be limited to officials. They are not supposed to apply bluntly to the whole population — which they do,” said Pierre-Emmanuel Dupont, an expert on sanctions law and formal legal adviser to the special rapporteur on sanctions at the United Nations. “[Sanctions] constitute collective punishment to the extent that they hit each and every Cuban citizen irrespective of their relationship with the government or regime.”
Dupont also pointed out that “the vast majority of the international community holds the view that economic warfare, sanctions, [and] de facto blockades are illegal under international law if they are not adopted by the [United Nations Security Council].”
The UN Security Council has never authorized the blockade against Cuba.
Oil as a Weapon
The oil blockade is not new. Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that Trump’s executive order shows the United States is using “blackmail, threats, and direct coercion of third countries . . . to impose additional pressure on the economic suffocation measures that have been in place since Trump’s first term.”
As we documented in our video program The War on Cuba, Trump began cutting off oil shipments to the island in 2019, two years after announcing he would roll back the historic détente brokered by Raúl Castro and Barack Obama. The oil blockade was part of a “maximum pressure” strategy that drove out foreign companies, wrecked the economy, impoverished the population, and pushed more than a million Cubans to leave the country.
Joe Biden maintained Trump’s economic war. On the campaign trail in 2020, he promised to “reverse the failed Trump policies that inflicted harm on Cubans and their families.” But once in office, he essentially handed Cuba policy to Bob Menendez — now in prison for corruption — and pandered to Menendez’s allies in Miami in the hopes it would help deliver him Florida in the 2024 election (the Democrats ended up getting trounced).
As the Trump–Biden sanctions intensified and Cuba’s economic crisis worsened, blackouts became increasingly frequent, contributing in part to the protests that broke out across the island on July 11, 2021.
“The blackouts lasted four to five hours,” a young Cuban man told Belly of the Beast in 2021 in San Antonio de los Baños, a small city not far from Havana where the demonstrations first erupted. “That’s why the protests happened here.”
Since the Trump administration abducted Nicolás Maduro and cut off oil shipments from Venezuela, blackouts in Cuba have worsened by an order of magnitude. Power outages in Havana are lasting upward of twelve hours a day and much longer in the rest of the country.
First China. Now Russia?
Trump justified the recent executive order, which threatened tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba, as a “national emergency” because “Cuba constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat.”
To arrive at the far-fetched conclusion that a small island that can barely keep the lights on represents a threat to the world’s most powerful country, the order stitches together an impressive tapestry of falsehoods. Cuba is alleged to host “Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility” and support “transnational terrorist groups” such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
These allegations are not supported by evidence.
Regarding a Russian spy base, Hal Klepak, professor emeritus of history and strategy at the Royal Military College of Canada, said, “I don’t think there’s any evidence that it exists, and that’s why they don’t present any, because there isn’t any. If there were any, they would give a place. . . . They have named no place. They have named no people.”
The accusation comes out of left field. For years, the talking point for hard-liners like Rubio was that China — not Russia — had spy bases in Cuba. There is no credible evidence to back up either claim (Belly of the Beast has debunked disinformation about “Chinese spy bases”).
“Cuba does not host any foreign military or intelligence bases and rejects the characterization of it as a threat to the security of the United States,” according to a statement released by the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday. “Nor has it supported any hostile activity against that country, nor will it allow its territory to be used against any other nation.”
Trump’s executive order says Cuba poses a threat to the United States because it “aligns itself with” and “provides support for” Russia and China.
“It’s true that Cuba has increasingly depended on trade with Russia and China, but the reason is not ideological nor even anti-American,” Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst who also served as the nation’s top intelligence officer on Latin America, told Belly of the Beast:
It is that, as the US has steadily increased the ‘maximum pressure’ tactics of its sixty-plus year-old embargo, Cuba has had to find alternatives. As Havana clearly demonstrated after Obama reestablished diplomatic relations, it would prefer to trade and interact with the United States.
Cuba Sponsors Medical Students, Not Terrorism
Ever since the 1990s, the “consensus position” in the US intelligence community has been that Cuba does not sponsor terrorism.
“The executive order repeats the unfounded allegations the Trump Administration used in 2021 to put Cuba on the State Department’s list of ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ — allegations that had no merit then and none now,” says Armstrong. “The US intelligence community for decades has repeatedly assessed that Cuba does not host terrorists nor provide terrorists support of any kind.”
There is no evidence that Hezbollah and Hamas are operating in Cuba. There are hundreds of Palestinians in Cuba — they’re on the island on full-ride scholarships training to be doctors, alongside medical students from over one hundred countries at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM).
We asked some of them what they thought of Trump’s claims.
“It’s a lie,” said Jenen Hani Alean Alzwaraa, a Palestinian medical student at ELAM. “There is no Hezbollah or Hamas here in Cuba. . . . Everyone came here to live in peace. Nobody is here for politics. We don’t want any problems. We just want to live like everyone else.”
“Someone who not only justifies but also denies the [Gaza] genocide that has been committed — you can’t trust someone like that,” said Ihab Masri, another Palestinian medical student.
The “national emergency” announced by Trump was also justified by concern over human rights in Cuba.
The idea that the Trump administration, which did not mention “human rights” once in its National Security Strategy, is concerned about rights violations in Cuba is difficult to believe. Similar concern has not been expressed for US allies with far worse human rights records: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, El Salvador, the Philippines — the list goes on.
“When Will This Blockade End?”
Recently, we asked Cubans in Havana about the executive order and what life looks like when fuel, electricity and transportation begin to disappear.
“The US says it’s for the good of Cubans, because they want to ‘help’ Cubans. It’s not for the good of Cubans; it’s what’s harming all Cubans,” said one woman we interviewed. “I’m sixty-one years old, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve felt the blockade, the blockade, the blockade. When will this blockade end?”
Nearby dozens of taxis stood idle near a gas station. “On average, we’ve been waiting twenty-four to seventy-two hours” to get gas, a taxi driver told us.
“We are here waiting to be able to get gas so we can fulfill our social duties, which include taking people to dialysis, working with the funeral home, with schools that don’t have parental support,” said another taxi driver.
A Deal in the Works?
Once Trump halted all Venezuelan oil shipments to the island, he warned Cuba that it better make a deal with the United States “before it is too late.”
Since signing the executive order, he said over the weekend, “We’re starting to talk to Cuba.”
Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, told Reuters Monday that Cuba is “ready to have a serious, meaningful and responsible dialogue.”
“We have had exchange of messages, we have embassies, we have had communications, but we cannot say we have had a table of dialogue,” added Cossío.
Trump has also said that Mexico, one of Cuba’s last oil lifelines, won’t be sending fuel to the island anymore.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, on Sunday said “humanitarian aid to Cuba” will continue “in the form of food and other products while we diplomatically resolve everything related to the shipment of oil for humanitarian reasons.”
Last week, Sheinbaum denounced Trump’s executive order, warning that imposing additional tariffs on countries that send oil to Cuba could trigger a large-scale “humanitarian crisis” on the island.
The War on Doctors
The United States isn’t just blocking Cuba’s ability to access oil; it’s trying to cut off foreign currency from entering the island by pressuring Caribbean countries to stop hiring Cuban medical professionals.
Antigua has taken steps to hire more than one hundred nurses from Ghana, likely to replace Cuban health workers.
Saint Lucia’s prime minister, Philip J. Pierre, announced last week that due to US pressure, Saint Lucia will no longer be sending medical students to Cuba.
“I have a big problem. Many of our doctors got trained in Cuba, and now the United States has said we can’t do that any longer,” Pierre said.
The small Caribbean island has relied heavily on Cuba for medical training. Cuban medical professionals have worked in Saint Lucia, supporting its health care system, for decades.
Saint Lucia is the latest casualty in the US government’s long campaign to coerce countries to stop receiving Cuban medical assistance under the guise of concern for human rights, claiming Cuban doctors are victims of “forced labor.”
Extensive research and interviews with the doctors themselves tell a different story. While the Cuban state takes more than half of payments for the missions in many cases, Cuban doctors and nurses volunteer to work abroad and are paid many times more than their tiny salaries back on the island.
Cuban medical teams most often are posted in working-class urban neighborhoods and remote rural areas home to the poorest of the poor. The teams have also been dispatched in response to international health emergencies such as Ebola in Africa and COVID-19 in Italy, as well as natural disasters including earthquakes in Pakistan and Haiti.
In Havana, the question is not about geopolitics. It is about gas for a taxi that takes patients to dialysis, electricity for a refrigerator, medicine for a child. For decades, US officials insisted that such hardship was incidental. Now some openly frame it as necessary. The mask is off. How this now openly acknowledged posture of hostility will shape public opinion, politics, and policy — both on the island and in the United States — is an open question.