Trump tightens the noose on Cuba’s fuel, betting an energy collapse will break the island

HAVANA--By threatening punishment for any country that keeps Cuba supplied with oil, US President Donald Trump is pushing the island toward an energy cliff that experts say is now measured in days, a strategy that amounts to trying to starve Cuba into collapse.

Analysts warn Cuba has, at most, about three weeks of oil left, with estimates placing the remaining reserves at roughly 15 to 21 days. Once that supply is gone, electricity generation could grind to a halt, fuel for transportation and schools would be further constrained, and the country would slide into a deeper crisis, a precarious situation tied directly to Trump’s campaign of pressure on states and companies still willing to ship petroleum to the island.

A new presidential decree targets anyone supplying Cuba “directly or indirectly” with oil, warning they could face tariffs on all goods they export to the United States. The White House said the move is meant to confront “the actions of the communist Cuban regime.”

On the ground, the squeeze is already visible. Large parts of Cuba are getting only a few hours of electricity a day, provincial television stations have gone off air, fuel supplies are thinning, public transportation is slowing, and many schools outside Havana are barely functioning.

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Cuba’s vulnerability is tied to its reliance on Venezuela, which has supplied about a third of its oil in recent years. That lifeline faltered after a US military operation on January 3 that abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, a moment Cubans quickly linked to an oncoming blackout season.

“I have two bits of news for you: one good and one bad,” said Elena Garcia, a 28-year-old web designer, recalling the morning she woke up after the operation. “The good news is that the water has arrived,” her boyfriend told her. “The bad news is that they kidnapped Maduro, and that means that this year we will surely have blackouts.”

In her neighborhood of Villa Panamericana, water deliveries had not arrived for a week. Even there, she described the area as relatively privileged compared with other parts of the city because it suffers fewer power cuts.

The pressure intensified days later. By January 11, Trump announced Venezuela would no longer provide Cuba with oil or money, framing the loss of Venezuelan support as a breaking point for Havana. Since early January, the United States has taken control of Venezuelan oil exports and is blocking the routes through which oil had been reaching Cuba, cutting off what had become the island’s key backstop.

Oil analyst Victoria Grabenwöger of Kpler said Cuba can keep going for roughly 15 to 20 days on current reserves. The last documented delivery arrived from Mexico on January 9, when the tanker Ocean Mariner entered Havana’s port. Whether Mexico will send more remains unclear after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum described any decision as “a sovereign decision.”

Trump has made plain what he expects the pressure to accomplish. On Thursday, he said he believes Cuba “will not be able to survive” under the current conditions, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated earlier that the US would “like to see a regime change” in Havana. Rubio also warned in the hours after the Venezuela operation: “Look, if I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.”

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel responded with defiance, denouncing “brutal threats.” The Cuban government has declared a “state of war,” and state media has aired images of soldiers preparing for a possible foreign attack. A former Cuban diplomat described the moment as “dangerously close to a declaration of war,” while Diaz-Canel posted on X that Cuba was ready to defend itself “to the last drop of blood.”

The gambit lands on an economy already worn down by decades of sanctions dating back to the 1960s. Cuba signaled openness to improved ties during the 2014 detente between Raul Castro and Barack Obama, but Trump’s first election in 2016 reversed that direction and brought a new wave of restrictions. Cuba endured in part because of its longstanding agreement with Venezuela: since 2000, subsidized oil flowed to Cuba in exchange for thousands of Cuban doctors, nurses, teachers, and other professionals.

Even before this month’s shock, Cuba was generating less than half the electricity it needs, with fuel shortages driving outages that sometimes lasted more than 12 hours a day. Anger over blackouts, food scarcity, and medicine shortages helped fuel the mass protests of 2021, and University of Havana communications professor Amanda Terrero warned that economic pressure, more than politics, is what could spark unrest again. “Any protest will be motivated first and foremost by economic issues,” she said. “If people had some respite, regardless of whether the political decisions are the most popular, they would be at ease. But the problem is that people aren’t getting any relief, because there’s no electricity, water or food.”

Fear and argument are spreading in parallel. Social media debates now swing between dread of invasion and calls for one, with Terrero saying some residents are even making contingency plans to leave the country. Garcia said she has seen intervention talk circulate, but she rejected it: “Calling for an invasion is the most annexationist thing someone can do,” she said. “It’s very clear that what people want are changes that they don’t know how to achieve, and this is a route they think is easy.”

At the same time, the Trump administration has sent mixed signals. Trump suggested he would watch the aftermath of Maduro’s removal chip away at Cuba’s economy, telling reporters on Air Force One that Venezuela had been Cuba’s financial lifeline and now “they won’t have that money coming in,” adding, “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know if they’re going to hold out.”

A destabilized Cuba would also carry risks for Washington. The economic crisis of the early 2020s triggered an unprecedented exodus, with roughly 10 percent of Cuba’s population leaving the island, and another migration wave could complicate Trump’s push to curb immigration. Political analyst and retired ambassador Carlos Alzugaray warned that if the Cuban government “falls,” the United States would inherit the consequences, given Cuba’s proximity to Florida.

That risk may be shaping the message coming out of Washington. Alzugaray noted Rubio’s recent emphasis on “stability,” including remarks on January 9 to oil executives that the US does not “have an interest in a destabilised Cuba.” Rubio also suggested it would be Cuba’s choice whether to seek prosperity or slip into “systemic and societal collapse.”

Trump has left the door open to negotiations too, urging Cuba on his social media platform “to make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” but oil, not diplomacy, is the immediate clock. With reserves running down and replacement supplies uncertain, ordinary households are already acting as if the worst is coming. One 25-year-old university professor in Havana, speaking anonymously, said her family ordered three packages of food and medicine from abroad after learning of Maduro’s abduction, storing them as a precaution in case conditions deteriorate.

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