Starting Jan. 11, the U.S. started an oil blockade after an attack on Venezuela, leading to significant impacts for the island nation of Cuba. Cuba now faces frequent blackouts that affect millions of citizens by plunging them into darkness. Hospitals have had to cease operation due to the lack of electricity. Cuban schools and businesses have also had to close amidst the drastic energy shortage. Transportation across the country has been severely impacted. Public transport has shut down, and many in the nation find it impossible to distribute necessities like food and water across the country.
Why has Cuba been so affected by the oil embargo? An article written by Times journalists Chad de Guzman and Miranda Jeyaretnam asserts that “Cuba’s power grid is built around obsolete, Soviet-made thermal power plants and relies heavily on oil imports.” The disruption of Venezuela, a major oil distributor for Cuba, has had cataclysmic results.
The U.S. and Cuba have had turbulent diplomatic relations in the past, such as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1992.
Cuba is now run as a one-party socialist republic. The Communist Party of Cuba runs the state, and Miguel Díaz-Canel is president. The U.S. had held a trade embargo with the island nation since John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Sanctions are no stranger to Trump, who in his first administration tightened them on Cuba in 2019 and 2020; according to Al-Jezeera, this “devastated Cuba’s tourism industry, one of its main sources of income.”
The goal of the most recent sanctions is simple: regime change. Orlando Perez, a political science professor at the University of North Texas at Dallas, told Al Jazeera, “We have been in this dance where the United States insists: Change your regime and then we will lift the embargo. And the Cubans say: Lift the embargo and we will make changes.”
Trump has made his stance clear on Cuba in Executive Order 14380, saying, “The United States has zero tolerance for the depredations of the communist Cuban regime.”
With Cubans under the thumb of Trump’s sanctions, aid has come from other places. Early on in the oil shortage, Canada and Mexico both sent supplies. Canada sent $8 million Canadian (U.S. $6.7 million) in food aid on Feb. 25, and Mexico sent two aid packages to Cuba comparable or larger to Canada’s. Russia sent 730,000 barrels of crude oil to Cuba to ease its shortage. Other countries have been cautious due to Executive Order 14380, which would impose a tariff on any country that supplies oil to Cuba.
Russia stood firm on its aid to Cuba.
“Cuba is our closest friend and partner in the Caribbean, and we don’t have the right to abandon it. Assistance to Cuba will continue,”Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova, said
Trump finds little concern in any aid to Cuba, stating, “Cuba’s finished. They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership, and whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.”
Article by Ty Jones