On March 16, Cuba’s national electricity grid collapsed for the third time in four months, plunging 10 million people into more than 29 hours of darkness. Hospitals struggled to keep generators running, water pumps shut down and refuse piled up on streets where collection trucks have sat empty for weeks.

The immediate cause is a fuel shortage building since January, when the United States cut off Cuba’s oil supply following the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

Mexico, which had become Cuba’s largest oil supplier, accounting for an estimated 44% of the island’s crude imports in 2025, halted deliveries under threat of US tariffs.

This is economic warfare – and it’s not new. But recent US government rhetoric has intensified the long-running tensions, leaving Cuba’s future up in the air.

‘Weaken the economic life of Cuba’

In 1960, a senior US State Department official wrote that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba” in order to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”.

That logic has guided US policy for more than six decades. This includes a full trade embargo in 1962 and the extraterritorial reach of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996.

In the 2024 General Assembly debate, Cuba’s foreign minister reported cumulative losses from the trade embargo of US$1.5 trillion (around A$2.1 trillion).

The first Trump administration’s reversed Obama-era diplomatic openings. Then, in January 2026, the second administration signed an executive order imposing a fuel........

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