America’s Next Victim: Cuba

Photo via Cubania Travel

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This past Monday, March 16th, Cuba experienced its third nationwide blackout in the past four months. The island’s electrical grid collapsed, depriving all of Cuba of electricity. That night, food spoiled in the fridges of families, women gave birth in powerless hospitals and many Cubans protested the electricity outage by banging pots and pans in the streets.

Photo via Yamil Lage, AFP, Getty Images 

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This same night in America, Donald Trump stood in the Oval Office and announced he believes he will have “the honor of taking Cuba.” He babbled on—“Taking Cuba, I mean, whether I free it, take it, think I can do anything I want with it.” It’s truly breathtaking to be an American at this moment, watching our own president’s reverie about seizing a sovereign nation that’s suffering under conditions his own administration engineered. The reality behind Cuba’s current suffering and its future direction can be traced back to the deliberate moves in Washington, D.C. 

These frequent blackouts in Cuba are not the fault of the Cuban government, but rather a consequence of America’s recent invasion of Venezuela. Their economy is incredibly dependent on imported oil, and they rely on Venezuela for approximately 30% of their oil supply. The country requires roughly 100,000 barrels of crude oil daily to sustain a functioning economy. As part of Trump’s Operation Absolute Resolve to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power, he also swiftly cut the pipeline of Venezuelan oil going to Cuba. A few weeks after the operation, Trump signed an EO titled “Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba,” threatening any country selling or providing oil to Cuba with increased tariffs. 

To no surprise, Mexico, Cuba’s leading oil supplier, stopped its shipments under this pressure from the administration; With the culmination of Venezuela and Mexico combined, 75% of Cuba’s annual oil supply was disrupted at the hands of the United States. The New York Times described the resulting policy as “the United States’ first effective blockade [of Cuba] since the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Trump explicitly acknowledged this maliciously strategic intervention, telling Politico, “We cut off all oil, all money… everything coming in from Venezuela, which was the sole source.” 

And he’s had staggering success so far; the day after Trump signed the EO, January 30th, the Financial Times reported that Cuba had enough oil reserves to last only 15 to 20 days at its current consumption levels. By March, the country was meeting about 40% of its fuel requirements, and that figure has continued to drop. On March 16th, a 29-hour blackout triggered by the collapse of the island’s largest power station (Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant) was not a surprise. Rather, it was a predictable result from American policy built to strangle them. 

The current state of day-to-day life has fallen to such a level that it’s been ringing alarms at the United Nations. The UN’s top official in Cuba, Francisco Pichón, cautioned that this crisis poses “a real risk to human suffering” and “the risk to people’s lives is not rhetorical”. Further, UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric warned that “Cuba’s already strained health system is approaching a critical point” on March 9. 

Currently in Cuba, hospitals are facing frequent power outages, the inability to operate equipment, shortages of essential medicines and disruptions to maternal, oncology, dialysis and emergency care. About 16,000 cancer patients requiring radiotherapy and over 12,000 dependent on chemotherapy cannot receive consistent treatments. 

Beyond necessary healthcare, nearly one million Cubans (10% of the Cuban population) are not receiving water because their shipments are delivered with tanker trucks that require large amounts of fuel. And ultimately, 84% of the island’s water-pumping infrastructure relies on electricity. 

In some areas, electricity has become incredibly scarce, with provinces in eastern Cuba reporting receiving power for only three hours a day. There’s also similar reporting on garbage trucks no longer running in parts of Havana, leaving waste to pile up and mosquito-borne disease to spread. 

Beyond impacting the economic and social landscape of Cuba, Trump is planning on politically weakening this country into submission. On March 16th, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials have told Cuban negotiators that President Miguel Díaz-Canel must step aside if the two countries can reach any agreement. The Trump administration views Díaz-Canel as a hard-liner unlikely to accept the economic reforms Washington wants—that is, the privatization of Cuba’s oil industry and a dependence on American business. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was pressed about Cuba’s future at a bilateral meeting with the Irish prime minister, where he bluntly stated that Cuba has “got some big decisions to make over there.” Rubio later publicly denied that the U.S. was plotting Díaz-Canel’s removal, but the denials rang hollow against the reporting from the Times and other verified accounts, as well as Trump’s statement on Air Force One: “I think we will pretty soon either make a deal or do whatever we have to do.” 

Venezuela first. Cuba now. Unsurprisingly, the Venezuela operation was always partly intended to stifle Cuba. Raúl Rodríguez, a researcher at the Center for Hemispheric and U.S. Studies, argues the deeper target has always been Cuba: “They’ve tried everything with Cuba. The hope in Washington now is that Venezuela’s collapse will cut off the cheap oil Cuba has relied on for decades, deepening an already severe economic crisis and triggering unrest that could topple the government.”

This is not an accusation, but rather the stated rationale of the Trump administration. He told reporters after the Venezuelan operation that “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall.” He has openly revived the Monroe Doctrine as his governing philosophy for the United States, which asserts U.S. domination over the global north, but what gives our country the right to undermine the liberties of sovereign nations? 

This stream of events closely parallels the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the U.S. captured dictator Manuel Noriega and put him on trial in America. Seeing this comparison clearly, Cuban President Díaz-Canel posted, “They plan to seize control of the country and its resources, including the economy they wish to suffocate to force our surrender,” on his social media after the March 16th blackout was restored. 

Ultimately, America is using coordinated diplomatic pressures and strategic conditions for a humanitarian emergency on an island of 11 million people, leaving Cubans sitting in the dark, struggling to keep food cold and waiting for medical care that may never come. America continues to actively disregard the lines between diplomacy and coercion, leveraging the real lives of Cuban people for political and geographical dominance.

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This article was edited by Elaina Gibson.