CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Cuba after Six Months of the Oil Blockade: Crisis and the Road to Recovery

For more than six decades, the United States has attempted to make the Cuban people pay for their decision to pursue an independent, socialist path. The latest phase of this economic war has targeted the island’s most vulnerable artery: its energy supply. Six months after Washington intensified pressure on countries and companies supplying oil to Cuba, the policy has not produced democracy or improved the lives of ordinary Cubans. It has produced darker homes, immobilised buses, interrupted hospitals, and greater difficulty in moving food from farms to cities.

The immediate task is to prevent a humanitarian disaster. The larger task is to replace coercion with sovereign cooperation and to help Cuba build an energy system that cannot again be strangled by a foreign power.

Six Months of Deepening Crisis

On 29 January 2026, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing a mechanism for additional tariffs on goods from any country that directly or indirectly supplied oil to Cuba. Washington presented the measure as a defence of US national security. Its practical purpose was unmistakable: to force third countries to choose between a small, economically distressed Caribbean nation and access to the enormous US market.

The tariff actions authorised under this, and several other emergency orders were terminated on 20 February. But the declared emergency remained in force, as did the wider sanctions system, threats against suppliers and uncertainty surrounding ships bound for Cuba. The result has been described as an effective oil blockade: not necessarily a permanent line of US warships, but a system of secondary pressure capable of frightening governments, banks, insurers, shipping companies, and traders away from legitimate commerce with Cuba. The blow fell on an economy already under extraordinary strain. Cuba had long depended on imported petroleum, particularly from Venezuela, while producing only part of its........

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