Workers fly the Cuban flag at half-mast at the Anti-Imperialist Tribune near the U.S. Embassy in Havana, on Jan. 5, 2026, in memory of Cubans who died in Caracas during the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces.Ramon Espinosa/The Associated Press
Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation.
Washington expects the final collapse of Fidel Castro’s system of government in Cuba. At least, U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio think that control of Venezuela’s oil means an independent, communist Cuba is on its deathbed. They may well be right.
Certainly, Mr. Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, with its emphasis on oil and not on restoring democracy, will mean the onset of very hard, even desperate, days for Cuba.
Cuba’s remaining 10 million people are accustomed to hard times. The country is short on food, which is expensive (most of its poultry comes from the U.S.); jobs are scarce; health care is slipping badly; medicines are hard to come by; schooling is difficult; government control is pervasive; and communist commanders tightly curtail all manner of ordinary and exceptional human freedoms. Now, with Mr. Trump severely rationing customary Venezuelan oil shipments, Cuba’s entire electrical system may shortly collapse, plunging everyone into unremitting darkness.
Even before the U.S. invasion of Venezuela, Cubans regularly lined up for hours, or sometimes days, to purchase (or barter for) fuel and foodstuffs. For years, they have endured rolling blackouts, or “load shedding.”
Cubans brace for tougher times as Trump says he’ll cut off Venezuelan oil deliveries
Cuba’s power grid is ancient, crumbling and runs almost entirely on the heavy and sludgy crude oil that once arrived weekly from Venezuela. Even with that steady source, the island faced punishing 12-hour blackouts throughout 2025. Without the cargo from Venezuela, energy experts predict that the island’s thermoelectric plants will go offline indefinitely very soon. Such a blackout will cripple water pumps, destroy refrigerated food stocks, and harm hospitals, making daily life physically impossible for millions.
Around 80 per cent of Cuba’s energy is generated using oil. This means that as the U.S. Navy tightens its blockade of Venezuelan non-Chevron oil shipments – to prevent China, Iran or Russia from replacing Venezuelan oil – Cuba will be besieged. Washington will also pressure Mexico to halt its already meagre oil shipments to Cuba. The U.S. military, Mr. Trump declared, will isolate Cuba permanently.
Cuba has, since at least 2002, depended on barrels of gifted Venezuelan oil to keep its lights on. (Fidel Castro rushed to protect former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez after a military uprising against him that year, and petroleum supplies from Caracas flowed ever after.) Indeed, Venezuela’s 50,000 daily gifted barrels (cut down recently to around 35,000), in addition to 22,000 barrels a day from Mexico (reportedly now down to 7,000), and around 7,000 barrels from Russia (plus limited domestic Cuban natural-gas supplies), hitherto enabled Cuba to keep its poorly maintained electrical grid operating. Venezuela even purposely supplied so much oil in the good years that Cuba could openly sell some of it on the world market (mostly to China) to gain foreign exchange and at least keep the island’s economy turning over.
Cubans worry about the future after U.S. capture of Venezuela’s Maduro
Now, Cuba’s available sources of foreign exchange will be few: Canadian and some Mexican tourism; some mined nickel; remittances; and the wages of a number of Cuban physicians sent to Africa (and, until recently, to Venezuela).
The Cuban regime’s survival has always depended on its ability to repress dissent, but repression requires fuel. Police trucks, troop transports and surveillance vehicles that crush protests cannot function without it. When Cuba’s strategic energy reserves run dry, the country’s military will forfeit its mobility. If the population rises up in frustration, and the police cannot physically deploy, the almost-ancient Cuban dictatorship could collapse because of a dearth of fuel.
As Mr. Trump says gleefully: “Cuba has no income. They got all their income from Venezuela.” The country, he went on, “looks like it’s going down.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, born in Miami to parents who emigrated to the U.S. before Fidel Castro’s rebellion against dictator Fulgencio Batista, would like such a collateral fallout from the enforced ouster of Nicolás Maduro.
But having a collapsed state 150 kilometres from the U.S. will cause more panicked migration. Why not bring Cuba in from the cold by providing the fuel, foodstuffs and medicines that the mass of Cubans – non-communists for the most part – need and crave? Why not find a clever, compassionate way to be a benevolent big brother, rather than a menacing and marauding one? Cuban communism might even, in its hour of acute need, succumb to a friendly embrace. Could Mr. Trump conceivably astound the world by rising to such a compassionate occasion?