Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

U.S. Oil Blockade Could Condemn Cubans to Die Without a Deal

The American oil blockade of Cuba has made conditions on the island dire, and reaching a deal has become a matter of life and death.

“Take a picture of a bus, if you see one, because it’s the last one you’ll see here in Cuba,” my taxi driver said. We were headed into Havana in his Chinese electric car during a trip I made to the island earlier this month.

The car is a novelty on Cuba’s crumbling streets, which are crowded with bikes and electric motorcycles and flanked by new solar parks and in-demand diesel generators. It’s also a lifesaver now more than ever amid a near-total oil blockade that has plunged the island’s residents into a profound state of uncertainty, fear, and hopelessness.

As the Trump administration starves Cuba of fuel in an attempt to force political and economic change on the island, conditions on the ground have grown more dire than I’ve ever witnessed in the 11 years I’ve been traveling there — including several years working as a journalist during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the country’s tourism-dependent economy was brought to a standstill.

Signs of the oil blockade are everywhere you look. Street corners are turning into trash dumps, transportation is prohibitively expensive, inflation is climbing, food is rotting in ports and refrigerators, and access to running water is intermittent, at best. 

A friend will not get to see his child be born, as his wife — one of many Cubans with dual Spanish citizenship — has flown across the Atlantic to give birth in Spain due to the dire state of Cuba’s state-run hospitals, once among the region’s best. 

Another friend with severe cataracts, who had undergone months of tests and lab work ahead of a surgery finally scheduled for February, learned the week before that it had been postponed indefinitely. Now, she can no longer see out of her left eye.

A third friend saw the cost of the wedding for which he’d been saving up for years double from one day to the next, as prices soared when the small reserves of fuel his vendors had got down to the last drops.

The Trump administration’s wager that depriving Cuba of oil would either provoke a mass uprising, browbeat the island’s authorities into subservience and a change in leadership, beget a free-market paradise — or some ill-defined combination of the three — is just the most recent in a series of “maximum-pressure” actions Secretary of State Marco Rubio has devised in an attempt to dislodge Cuba’s rulers from power, a longtime goal for him and for many Cuban Americans. 

Pentagon Reveals Attacks in Latin America Are Just the Beginning

This campaign has been ongoing since Trump’s first term, when Rubio, the president’s de facto secretary of state for Latin America, helped restrict Americans’ ability to travel and send money to the island; cut off Cuba’s access to international finance; shutter the U.S. Embassy in Havana; and deploy dozens more sanctions over everything from hotel contracts and cruise lines to banking and investment, most of which were kept in place under the Biden administration. 

Now, in Trump’s second term, the maximum-pressure strategy for which Rubio has taken full credit has accelerated into full gear. Not only has the administration coerced Venezuela and Mexico, until recently Cuba’s two largest fuel suppliers, into halting........

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