To understand the gravity of this moment, one must reject the dominant narrative that frames Cuba’s current crisis as a consequence of its own intransigence or its political choices. A sober assessment reveals this fuel blockade as the latest tactic in a 65-year war of economic siege waged by the world’s foremost power against a small island that dared to claim its sovereignty. Trump’s intervention in Venezuela can only confirm that this escalation could be a dangerous precursor to a military attack against another independent country in Latin America.
The blockade was never merely a severing of ties between the United States and Cuba. As Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez wrote in 1975, it was “a ferocious attempt at genocide promoted by a power almost without limits, whose tentacles appear in any part of the world.” This logic of annihilation was articulated early on by US officials themselves. In a memorandum dated April 6, 1960, Lester Mallory, deputy assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, coldly advised: “The majority of Cubans support Castro… The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” From its inception, the blockade was designed to crush morale and force surrender, a strategy of economic terror disguised as policy.
Yet, the prevailing conclusion in the media by experts across the political spectrum in the US often suggests that Cuba’s crisis is self-inflicted. They argue that if only Havana would enact “major reforms,” privatize its economy, and submit to what it calls “free and fair” elections on American terms, the crisis would vanish. This argument requires a willful ignorance of history and a suspension of material reality. It imagines a parallel universe in which the United States government’s strategic objective, the overthrow of the Cuban government and the re-establishment of a pliant, neo-colonial regime, simply evaporates through negotiation. The historical record offers no such fantasy.
Read more: From blockade to asphyxiation: the US war on Cuba enters its most brutal phase
Since 1959, the US has pursued a relentless campaign to break Cuba, documented in thousands of declassified pages. This includes the Bay of Pigs invasion, hundreds of documented assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders, Operation Mongoose’s campaign of sabotage and terrorism, and the introduction of deadly pathogens that decimated the island’s pig population and the biological warfare that afflicted its people with hemorrhagic dengue in 1981 killing 101 children. As Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel stated before the United Nations, “For more than six decades, we have been victims of an economic, commercial and financial blockade, the most unjust, severe and prolonged system of unilateral sanctions ever applied against any country.” The blockade, estimated by the Cuban government to have cost over USD 1.3 trillion and countless lives due to denied medicines and equipment, is not a passive policy. It is, in the words of Cuban intellectual Fernando Martínez Heredia, “a form of permanent, low-intensity warfare.”
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington escalated its assault through the Torricelli Act (1992), the Helms-Burton Law (1996), and a portfolio of measures announced by George W. Bush in 2004, each tightening the noose around Cuba’s economy. Even during periods of nominal thaw, such as under Barack Obama, the underlying objective remained unchanged. Obama’s outreach, including his 2016 visit to Havana, was seen by some as an attempt to “change” Cuba through grassroots contact. Yet, in a twist of irony, many US visitors visiting Cuba in large numbers for the first time returned home transformed, advocating not for regime change, but for an end to the blockade and closer relations.
This fleeting openness was swiftly reversed under Donald Trump, who imposed 243 new sanctions against Cuba, ruthlessly restricting remittances, travel, and exchanges. Under Joe Biden, the sanctions remained fully armed, perpetuating what García Márquez described as a state of permanent siege: “The threat of armed invasions, systematic sabotage, constant provocations were for Cubans a source of tension and a drain on human energy far more severe than the commercial blockade.”
Trump’s siege
The Trump administration’s fuel blockade represents an unprecedented escalation of this warfare. By leveraging the global reach of the US financial system to terrorize third countries and foreign companies, the US has effectively militarized the global market against a small, developing nation. The goal is explicit: to induce collapse through collective punishment. When Trump declared that Cubans would “probably come to us & want to make a deal,” he revealed the core imperial delusion that has guided failed US policy for over six decades. It is the belief that unbearable pressure will force surrender.
The fuel blockade is the highest expression of the US economic war against Cuba, as energy is the lifeblood of any modern economy. Without fuel, transportation halts, generators fall silent, and agricultural production and distribution cease.
As García Márquez observed during his visit to the island, “One thing was irreplaceable in that situation: oil.” He noted how back then Soviet tankers traveled 12,000 kilometers to ensure that “not a single minute of activity was halted in Cuba.” Today, that lifeline, which was heavily dependent on fuel imports from Russia, Mexico, and Venezuela, is under direct attack. On January 29, 2026, the Trump administration transformed a long-standing campaign of pressure into a blunt instrument of suffocation. With an executive order, it weaponized the US tariff system against any nation that dares to sell oil to Cuba. This is no longer about isolating or containing the Cuban people from the rest of the hemisphere; it is a deliberate strategy of total economic asphyxiation, a move unseen in its aggression since the Cold War.
Trump’s escalation is the cornerstone of his administration’s “Donroe Doctrine,” a 21st-century revival of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that declares the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean to be US property. Following the illegal attack of January 3, 2026, on Venezuela, Trump stated plainly: “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” Under this doctrine, any nation that chooses an independent path, especially one that organizes its economy around human needs, such as Cuba’s world-renowned healthcare system, is deemed a “national emergency.”
The Cuban leadership’s refusal to capitulate is therefore not, as critics allege, motivated by dogmatism or a desire for martyrdom. It is informed by a clear understanding of the US government’s objectives and centuries of its own anti-colonial struggle. To surrender principles for temporary relief would not bring peace or prosperity; it would invite the wholesale reversal of Cuban sovereignty. This is why, despite the immense cost, Cuba has never surrendered to the blockade. It is also why Cuba has consistently expressed its willingness to negotiate on equal footing, but never to negotiate its existence.
The human implications of the fuel blockade are devastating. Hospitals ration electricity, jeopardizing medical care. Families wait for hours for sporadic public transport. Blackouts of 20 hours or more become a daily ordeal. Yet, even in this US manufactured crisis, the resilience of the Cuban people is evident.
For people in the United States, understanding this situation requires a break with their own government’s extreme violence towards Cuba. The fuel blockade is not a “policy disagreement.” It is an act of economic terrorism designed to foment hunger, suffering, and instability until a sovereign government abdicates. Cuba’s steadfastness, against all odds, remains a powerful testament to the fact that even the most powerful empire cannot extinguish the desire for dignity and self-determination.
Manolo De Los Santos is Executive Director of The People’s Forum and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His writing appears regularly in Monthly Review, Peoples Dispatch, CounterPunch, La Jornada, and other progressive media. He coedited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War (LeftWord, 2020), Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro (LeftWord, 2021), and Our Own Path to Socialism: Selected Speeches of Hugo Chávez (LeftWord, 2023).
