Cuba faces ‘zero hour’ as Trump, Rubio put squeeze on regime

Cuba’s communist government is facing a breaking point in its battle for survival under pressure from President Trump, whose energy quarantine against the country is aimed at collapsing the regime.

The consequences are hitting the population of 10 million people hard, with the U.S. fuel blockade exacerbating a decades-long economic crisis, disrupting access to water and worsening food and medicine shortages. 

“There’s a number of epidemics rippling through the population right now, repression is increasing as the regime feels cornered, and they are not signaling any willingness to negotiate with the United States,” said Sebastián Arcos, interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

“These people are really, really bad guys, and they have shown this capacity to survive difficult crises,” he added. “I don’t think they can survive this one.”

Trump on Friday suggested the U.S. could achieve a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, perhaps mirroring America’s approach to Venezuela, where the military took out its leaders but kept the regime largely in place while demanding greater economic cooperation. 

Analysts aren’t convinced that such a path exists for the hard-line Cuban regime, which has been fighting against U.S. threats for six decades. 

“What’s going to happen in Cuba is much more difficult to divine than Venezuela,” Arcos said. “Cuba is a unified ideological leadership, where any deviation from the dogma is severely punished, and no one, therefore, is willing to risk that unless the United States escalates.” 

‘Zero hour’ approaching

Jorge Piñon, director of the Latin America and Caribbean Energy Program with the University of Texas in Austin, said time is running out for the Cuban regime to make a deal or risk an even graver humanitarian crisis on the island. 

“If we don’t see a tanker come into Havana sometime by mid-March, that’s what we call the zero hour. In other words, that’s it. There’s no inventory, there’s no strategic reserves, that’s it, they’re out of business.”

Trump’s decision Wednesday to greenlight deliveries of fuel to Cuba for commercial businesses and humanitarian deliveries is a “drop in the bucket” for the country’s needs, Piñon said. 

Piñon estimates the deliveries amount to 150 barrels of fuel into the country per day, compared to the needs of 22,000 barrels a day.

“I think we welcome it, but at the end of the day it’s small,” he said. 

Francisco Pichón, United Nations resident coordinator in Cuba, told the U.N. Thursday that 5 million people on the island are living with chronic illnesses and their treatments are at risk due to the energy crisis, including thousands of cancer patients that need oncology care. There are more than 32,000 pregnant women who need services.

Food security is deteriorating without fuel for trucks to deliver commodities, and 1 million people face water shortages without electricity to pump wells. 

Pichón argued that Trump’s threats of tariffs against countries that break the U.S. fuel blockade are empty, following the Supreme Court ruling invalidating the president’s power. A tanker carrying Russian oil is drifting in the Atlantic Ocean after earlier charting a course to Cuba. Closer countries are likely wary of triggering Trump’s wrath by breaking the blockade.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is taking the lead on the administration’s strategy, reportedly holding talks with the grandson of Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old de facto leader of the authoritarian government. 

Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, serves as his grandfather’s bodyguard and is believed to oversee Cuba’s armed forces’s conglomerate, known as GAESA, which controls much of the island’s economy. The Miami Herald reported that in 2024, GAESA had about $18 billion in assets and in unknown bank accounts. 

The meeting reportedly took place this past week on the sidelines of the regional Caribbean conference Caricom in St. Kitts and Nevis. 

Rubio, speaking to reporters, signaled that the Trump administration is not demanding immediate regime change in Havana. 

“Cuba needs to change. It needs to change. And it doesn’t have to change all at once,” he told reporters Wednesday.

A deadly confrontation on Wednesday between the Cuban coast guard and a group of U.S. citizens and residents aboard a stolen boat looked like it could derail any efforts at diplomacy, with four killed and others wounded, taken into custody and accused of “terrorism.”

However, both sides have issued public statements aimed at bringing down the temperature. 

“This one could be either a legitimate attempt by exiles to fight the regime or just another false flag op,” said Arcos, from the Cuban Research Institute. “The timing is certainly suspicious. Either way, this will not interfere with the conversation taking place at the highest levels.”

Earlier this month, Rubio hinted that one of the U.S. demands is economic change in Cuba. In an interview on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Rubio said Cubans need “economic freedom” when asked if there is an off-ramp for the regime. 

“It is important for the people of Cuba to have more freedom, not just political freedom but economic freedom,” Rubio told Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait.

“So I think there has to be that opening, and it has to happen, and I think now Cuba is faced with such a dire situation.” 

Bloomberg reported Thursday that the administration’s strategy is to force Havana to accept U.S. conditions in exchange for oil. 

Daniel Batlle, an adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute, said the Cuban regime may prove flexible to ensure its survival, given how the U.S. is treating Venezuela. 

“The regime wants to survive, they don’t want to give up on the revolution that they fought for and managed to keep going all this time,” he said. 

“That said, today it’s less of an ideological regime than a mafia state that lives off of controlling the tourism industry and the other profitable parts of the economy.”

Hopes for normalization of ties

Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA officer and Central America analyst, said that if both the U.S. and Cuban regime want to avoid a humanitarian crisis, both sides could engage in normalization similar to what was taking place under the former Obama administration but ended in Trump’s first term. 

Trump could demand Cuba eject Russian and Chinese influence from the country, as listed in the president’s executive order on Jan. 29 announcing the fuel quarantine.

“This is probably where my hope plays in a little bit more, is that the Trump, Rubio people realize that normalization was the best deal possible,” he said, allowing the current Cuban regime to open up to U.S. trade, tourism and business and implement liberal economic reforms. 

“We’re not going to like the pace, we’re not going to like every element, but we don’t like the pace and element of a lot of stuff in the world,” he continued. “But it will reduce the prospects of humanitarian crisis, humanitarian disaster.”

Rubio — as the son of Cuban immigrants who has long railed against the communist regime — is likely to give the administration breathing room in the face of hard-line, Cuban American and Florida lawmakers in Washington demanding outright regime change. 

“My sense is that they have views but that they are going to give the administration a wide berth,” said Batlle, of the Hudson Institute. 

“With Marco Rubio in the role he’s in, there’s a lot of trust that the administration is going to do the right thing. They may express concerns about the timing and the way the administration goes about it. But I think at the end of the day, they’re not going to get an administration that is more sympathetic to them than this one.” 

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