Albert Moreau | Partisan Québécois
Cuba is going through one of its most serious periods since the Missile Crisis of 1962. Since Donald Trump and his clique returned to power in 2025, the American government has considerably strengthened its illegal blockade against Cuba — an embargo condemned almost every year by the United Nations for more than three decades. Since January 11, 2026, the American Empire has formally banned any Venezuelan oil tanker from supplying Cuba, even though the US Navy had already been illegally intercepting these tankers since December 2025. Trump’s “maximum pressure” measures, aimed at strangling Cuba’s fuel supply, have triggered a humanitarian crisis with extremely grave consequences, given that the island’s electrical infrastructure runs primarily on oil. The island is suffocating more and more: hospitals are left without electricity, harvests are rotting in the fields, public transit is failing.
A Little Context
Even if Cuba’s energy crisis has worsened over the past four months, the American blockade has been going on for a long time. Here is a brief overview of the history of the illegal embargo against Cuba before December 2025.
1959 — The Cuban Revolution
Fidel Castro and the M-26-7 revolutionaries overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista, a puppet of the American government. Under Batista, nearly the entire Cuban economy was controlled by foreign interests, including American ones. The new revolutionary government therefore decided to nationalise industries and launch an agrarian reform to redistribute land to the Cuban people, much to the dismay of American capitalists.
1960 — The First Sanctions
Following the industry nationalisation measures and agrarian reforms brought about by the revolutionaries, the first US economic sanctions against Cuba are put in place under President Dwight Eisenhower.
1962 — The Blockade Begins
US President John F. Kennedy decrees an embargo on all trade with Cuba. That same embargo has now lasted 66 years.
1992 — The Torricelli Act
Under the George H. W. Bush administration, the US strengthens the embargo by adopting the Torricelli Act, which imposes sanctions on any country providing assistance to Cuba and prohibits companies from third-party countries from selling Cuba goods whose technology contains more than 10% American components — blocking the island’s access to much medical and petroleum equipment.
1996 — The Helms-Burton Act
The Bill Clinton administration adopts the Helms-Burton Act, which sanctions any company, regardless of nationality, that establishes itself on properties nationalised in 1959.
1991–2000 — The “Special Period”
Following the fall of the USSR in 1991, Cuba is deprived of its main economic partner and enters a severe crisis: the island abruptly loses 70% of its oil, the country’s GDP collapses by 44%, and Cubans lose an average of 10 to 15 kg due to famines caused by the lack of fuel for agricultural equipment. Venezuela would slowly take the place of the USSR following the election of Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution.
2000–2016 — Easing and Obama’s Thaw
Since 2000, food products have been exempted from the blockade, allowing American companies to sell certain food products and medicines to Cuba. On December 17, 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro simultaneously announced the restoration of diplomatic relations between their two countries. Embassies reopened and travel restrictions eased. The embargo was not lifted, however.
2017–2021 — Trump’s First Term
Trump cancels most of Obama’s concessions, reimposing severe restrictions on travel and money transfers, and re-lists Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism in January 2021. Joe Biden, toward the end of his presidency, announces his intention to remove Cuba from this list in January 2025. Trump immediately reverses this decision, just hours after the inauguration of his second term.
Trump’s Second Term
Trump’s second term is shaping up to be the most genocidal toward Cuba since 1959. From January 20, 2025, just hours after his inauguration, Trump re-lists Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, triggering additional financial sanctions that further isolate the island from the global banking system. Unfortunately, the worst was still to come.
On January 3, 2026, in the early hours of the morning, Donald Trump and his clique bombed Caracas and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The acting president, who remained loyal to Maduro, was forced to adopt a policy of retreat in the face of the United States, which holds her at gunpoint. Oil deliveries to Cuba are suspended under American threats.
The consequences of this energy blockade are felt in every corner of Cuban life. Hospitals now operate under conditions one would associate with a country at war: surgeries are suspended, radiology, ultrasound, and tomography equipment sits dark for lack of electricity. Since the oil blockade began in January 2026, Havana has recorded 14 deaths per 1,000 live births — the highest rate in more than two decades. Cuba had an infant mortality rate of 4 per 1,000 live births in 2018; it has therefore almost quadrupled in eight years. Alexander Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, states that “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ policy against Cuba has killed many babies, and it is very likely that more babies are dying now, at an even higher rate.”
On the food front, the situation is equally disastrous. The fuel shortage deprives farmers of their machinery, preventing the harvesting of entire crops that rot in the fields. René Orellana, the regional representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, stated it plainly in March 2026: the population simply will not be able to access this food. The transportation of goods to markets is paralysed, lines grow longer in front of state grocery stores, and protein has practically disappeared from Cuban tables. Wages, often the equivalent of $15 to $30 USD per month, are no longer enough to cover the price of a few kilos of tomatoes or a bottle of oil. According to recent surveys, 80% of Cubans consider the current crisis more severe than the “Special Period” of the 1990s — that period when the island lost 70% of its oil following the collapse of the USSR and Cubans lost an average of 10 to 15 kg due to famines.
Let’s Call a Spade a Spade
What Cubans are living through today is not a natural disaster, nor the result of poor internal management. It is the direct and deliberate result of an American policy whose stated objective is to provoke an illegal regime change in Cuba, regardless of the human cost. Donald Trump himself proclaims it, calling on Miguel Díaz-Canel’s government to “make a deal before it’s too late” — spoken like a true mafioso.
What Washington has put in place since January 2026 goes even further than the traditional blockade. By kidnapping Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and militarily cutting off Venezuelan oil deliveries, then threatening commercial sanctions against any country — Mexico, Russia, Algeria — that dares supply fuel to Cuba, the American Empire has transformed an economic blockade into a true weapon of mass destruction deployed in slow motion. The babies dying in incubators in Havana are not collateral damage. They are the predictable, calculated result of a policy built to kill.
Washington’s strategy is genocide.
¿Cuba No Está Sola! — Cuba Is Not Alone!
Despite the silence of Western media, the world has not looked away. On March 31, 2026, the Russian tanker Anatoly Kolodkin docked at the port of Matanzas, bringing the first oil delivery to Cuba since January 9 — 730,000 barrels of crude oil. On the dock, Cubans had made the trip to witness the ship’s manoeuvres. Russian Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilyov announced the dispatch of a second tanker a few days later, stating that “we will not leave Cubans in difficulty.”
In the same spirit, the citizen flotilla Nuestra América, launched by international activists from Progressive International, delivered two sailboats loaded with humanitarian aid to the port of Havana on March 24, 2026, inspired by the flotillas that had braved the Israeli blockade on Gaza.
Cuba is not alone.
“Imperialism will be defeated, inevitably. Who taught us this lesson? It is the peoples who taught it to us.” — Fidel Castro, Tricontinental Conference, January 15, 1966
