“No Food, No Fuel, No Excuse”
How the U.S. Manufactured Cuba’s Latest Crisis
In the middle of war headlines and election drama, something brutal is happening just 90 miles off our coast.
Cuba is sliding toward what the UN is openly calling a possible humanitarian “collapse.” Not because of a natural disaster. Not because the island suddenly forgot how to run power plants. But because powerful governments decided to use oil, the literal ability to turn the lights on, as a weapon.
This is not an accident. It’s policy.
What changed: the Venezuelan oil lifeline
For years, Cuba survived its chronic economic problems thanks in large part to Venezuelan oil. Caracas shipped heavily subsidized fuel to Havana, and in return got medical brigades and political support.
That arrangement was already fraying as Venezuela’s own crisis deepened. But the real break came when the Trump administration moved aggressively to seize control of Venezuelan oil export, tightening sanctions, threatening ship owners and insurers, and effectively choking off the flow of crude that kept Cuban power plants running.
By early 2026, experts estimate Cuba had lost roughly 90 percent of its previous Venezuelan fuel supply. You don’t have to be an economist to understand what happens when a tiny island that imports most of its energy loses nine-tenths of its fuel.
The lights go out. Literally.
Life in the dark
Here’s what that looks like on the ground.
Nationwide blackouts lasting hours or most of the day. Refrigerators warm up; food spoils.
Buses and public transport routes are cut because there’s no diesel. Students can’t reliably get to universities; workers lose wages because they physically can’t get to work.
Hospitals are postponing surgeries, limiting services, and struggling to keep machines running during prolonged outages.
Garbage collection is breaking down as trucks sit idle without fuel, with all the public health problems that come with that.
Cuban media, independent reporters, and foreign outlets are all documenting the same thing: long lines for food and fuel, people cooking over wood or charcoal, families planning their days around blackout schedules instead of clocks.
This is happening in a country that already went through the “Special Period” after the Soviet collapse, when people survived on powdered milk and bicycles. Older Cubans know exactly what this kind of crisis feels like. Many will quietly tell you: this is starting to look like that again.
People are protesting…at great risk
If you’ve seen short clips of protests in Cuba recently, they’re not staged. They’re people who are hot, hungry, and running out of patience.
In cities like Santiago, Havana, and Matanzas, people have taken to the streets banging pots and pans in the darkness, chanting for “electricity and food” and, in some cases, calling out both the United States and their own government.
University students, who are rarely allowed to protest, have staged sit-ins and marches over blackouts and loss of internet access.
The Cuban state’s response has been predictable: arrests, intimidation, warnings, a clampdown on independent media. Political prisoners were already at record highs before this latest round.
So yes, there is very real repression and mismanagement inside Cuba. The government bears responsibility for years of corruption, bad planning, and a refusal to loosen its grip on the economy. But that is only half the story.
The U.S. role: sanctions as a slow-motion weapon
The other half is us.
For six decades, Washington has maintained an embargo that restricts trade and finance with Cuba. Every year, the UN General Assembly votes overwhelmingly to condemn it; the U.S. and a tiny cluster of allies keep it alive anyway.
Under Trump, that pressure was turned up even further:
New sanctions hit shipping companies and insurers that carried oil to Cuba, especially from Venezuela.
U.S. officials celebrated the fact that tankers stopped docking in Cuban ports, framing it as “cutting off the lifeline” to the regime.
Behind closed doors, the stated goal was clear: not just to punish Havana, but to finally push the Cuban system to a breaking point by starving it of fuel.
Human rights experts at the UN warned that using energy access this way, deliberately degrading a population’s ability to power hospitals, keep water running, and cook food, crosses a line from “pressure” into collective punishment.
In February, the UN’s special rapporteur on the impacts of unilateral sanctions effectively said, in diplomatic language: if oil doesn’t start flowing again, you could see a humanitarian collapse in Cuba.
That is not an accident. That is the foreseeable outcome of policy.
The “soft” U-turn: too little, too late
Once it became clear that Cuba’s crisis was spilling over, threatening migration surges, regional instability, and a PR disaster, Washington started to blink.
In late February, the Trump administration announced that it would allow companies to apply for special licenses to resell Venezuelan oil to Cuba for “commercial and humanitarian” uses.
Sounds generous, right? Not so fast.
The licenses are narrow, temporary, and can be revoked at any time.
Companies have to prove the fuel won’t benefit Cuban state security services or sanctioned entities, an almost impossible purity test in a state-run energy system.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials have floated the idea of slapping tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba outside this framework, keeping the threat-level high.
Caribbean and Latin American governments are scrambling to fill the gap. Mexico, Brazil, and others have discussed emergency shipments, but they’re doing so while nervously looking over their shoulders at Washington.
So the message is: “We might let a little oil through so things don’t completely fall apart, but only on our terms, and we reserve the right to shut it off again.”
That is not humanitarianism. That is leverage.
“But isn’t this about freedom and democracy?”
If you support human rights and democracy, it is tempting to see any pressure on an authoritarian government as a net good. I get that impulse.
But here’s the hard question: who is actually feeling this pressure?
It’s not primarily the ministers and generals in Havana. It’s the nurse whose hospital generator dies. The teacher who can’t get to school. The mom deciding whether tonight’s ration of rice goes to her kids or her parents.
The U.N., the Catholic Church, and a growing number of regional leaders are saying the quiet part out loud: U.S. policy is helping create conditions where ordinary Cubans suffer first, longest, and hardest, with no guarantee that the people who created the system will lose power.
We have already seen this movie: in Iraq in the 1990s, in Venezuela more recently. Sweeping sanctions and economic strangulation weaken societies, hollow out middle classes, and empower security forces and black markets. They don’t magically produce democracy.
Neighborly love and the ethics of turning off the lights
If you care about neighborly love, justice, or even just basic human decency, it should bother you that our government is comfortable using food, fuel, and electricity as bargaining chips.
It should bother you that a policy described in D.C. as “pressuring the regime” shows up on the island as rotting food, dark operating rooms, and another generation of kids doing homework by candlelight, if they have the energy to do homework at all.
Yes, the Cuban government needs to be held accountable for its own corruption, repression, and terrible economic management. Cubans are doing that themselves, in the streets, at great personal risk.
But neighborly love doesn’t say, “Well, your government is bad, so it’s fine if we help cut off your oxygen.” It says: “Your government is failing you. We’re not going to join in.” There’s a difference.
What would a humane policy look like?
If this really were about supporting the Cuban people and not using them as pawns, U.S. policy would look very different. At minimum, it would mean:
Lifting or suspending restrictions that block fuel and essential goods needed for hospitals, power, and basic services, and making that exemption durable, not an on-again, off-again threat.
Dropping secondary sanctions and tariff threats that punish other countries for selling oil or aid to Cuba.
Expanding legal channels for Cuban migration and remittances instead of forcing people into dangerous irregular routes when conditions at home become unbearable.
Supporting independent civil society, churches, unions, and local initiatives that give Cubans more power over their own lives, instead of just tightening the screws from the outside.
That doesn’t mean endorsing the Cuban government. It means refusing to make life unlivable for 11 million people just to prove a geopolitical point.
We cannot look away
In the weeks ahead, you’re going to see more stories and more videos from Cuba: lines, protests, night-time marches, angry people in the dark.
You will also hear politicians in the U.S. frame this as proof that socialism doesn’t work, that the embargo is “finally biting,” or that the crisis somehow validates six decades of punishment.
Don’t let them flatten this into a talking point.
Cuba’s crisis is real. Its government’s failures are real. But the fuel shortage strangling daily life right now is not a random act of God or an inevitable law of economics. It’s the direct result of choices made in Washington and in other capitals that decided ordinary Cubans were acceptable collateral damage.
We can’t fix that by looking away.