Cuban-flagged tanker Pastorita anchors near the Matanzas terminal in Cuba on Jan. 7. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday that no more Venezuelan oil or money will go to Cuba.Norlys Perez/Reuters
As her six-year-old granddaughter jumped rope next to other children in a Havana park, María Antonia Iglesias said she is worried about the future.
Two years ago, Ms. Iglesias, 70, came with her family to Havana to escape poor living conditions in the eastern city of Holguín. “My daughter was cooking with firewood,” she said.
But in the Cuban capital, life is not much easier, with pharmacy shelves all but empty, food shortages and rolling power outages, owing in large part to more than 60 years of the embargo by the United States, and further sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Venezuela’s regime remains in place, but an exiled opposition makes plans to reshape the country
Still, up until now Havana has managed to withstand the U.S. pressure thanks in part to a deal with Venezuela, which for the past 25 years shipped subsidized oil to the island while Cuba sent its ally tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, teachers and sports coaches.
After a foiled Washington-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002, security and counterintelligence co-operation between the two countries tightened.
But with Mr. Trump announcing that Venezuelan oil deliveries to Cuba will cease, a week after a U.S. military operation seized Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, Cubans are bracing for even tougher times.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel during the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on July 7, 2025.MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP/Getty Images
On Truth Social Sunday, Mr. Trump appeared to goad the Cuban government. “Most of those Cubans are dead from last week’s U.S.A. attack,” he wrote, referring to the 32 Cuban security personnel killed in Caracas during Mr. Maduro’s abduction.
Mr. Trump continued: “Cuba lived, for many years, on large amounts of oil and money from Venezuela … there will be no more oil or money going to Cuba. I strongly suggest they make a deal, before it is too late.”
Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s President, responded defiantly.
“Cuba is a free, independent and sovereign nation,” he wrote on X, adding that Cubans are “ready to defend the homeland to the last drop of blood.”
On Saturday, Cuba held a National Defence Day. State-run television broadcast images of civilians training to “confront enemy actions” with rifles, machine guns and rocket launchers, while military men were shown operating Soviet-era tanks and surface-to-air missiles.
The island once had the largest standing army in Latin America after that of Brazil, but today much of its equipment is aging and largely obsolete, said Hal Klepak, a professor emeritus of history and strategy at the Royal Military College of Canada who also served as an adviser to the Canadian foreign-affairs and defence ministers.
Cubans worry about the future after U.S. capture of Venezuela’s Maduro
Cuban armed forces and militias defeated the U.S.-organized invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
“The Cuban President needs to fall back on Cuba’s long-term Vietnamese-imported idea of a war of all the people, and that means stimulating this despondent population to think again in these historic terms of defence of the country, and that we will decide for ourselves our future,” Prof. Klepak said. “Those things are part of the Cuban psyche, but have been shaken by 36 years of incredibly difficult times.”
Cuba’s economy is in freefall, battered by unprecedented U.S. economic warfare. “Maximum pressure” sanctions imposed by Mr. Trump during his first term have cut Cuba off from international trade, investment and most of the world’s banking system. Economists say U.S. sanctions cost the island billions of dollars a year.
Analysts agree the loss of Venezuelan oil, which covers a significant portion of the island’s energy needs, would devastate Cuba’s economy. But some question whether this would bring about the result desired by U.S. Secretary of State and Cuban American regime-change advocate Marco Rubio.
Workers fly the Cuban flag at half-mast at the Anti-Imperialist Tribune near the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, on Jan. 5, in memory of the Cubans who died during the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by U.S. forces.Ramon Espinosa/The Associated Press
Reuters reported on Saturday that the most recent CIA assessments about whether a worsening Cuban economy would destabilize its government were inconclusive.
“Washington policy makers have had the pipe dream of imminent collapse of the Cuban government ever since 1959,” said William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University who has written extensively about U.S.-Cuban relations, referring to the date of the revolution that ushered in the current communist government.
“Rubio seems to think that if you collapse the Cuban economy and immiserate the Cuban people, they will automatically rise up and overthrow the government. The reality is there is no automatic connection between economic collapse and political collapse.”
Meanwhile, Cuba’s political opposition is in tatters.
“The Cuban opposition is as weak as it has been in decades,” Prof. LeoGrande said. “All the principal leaders of it are either in exile or in jail.”
For some ordinary Cubans, the politics are taking a back seat to daily survival.
“Right now, the neighbourhood down the road is in blackout,” said Enrique, 34, a software programmer who preferred not to give his last name for fear of reprisals, passing through a park as children nearby played baseball and soccer. “Everyone knows that this doesn’t work and yet somehow [the government] remains in place.”