Mexico Warns of “Far-Reaching Humanitarian Crisis” in Cuba, As US Seeks to Starve Island Nation Into Final Submission

Donald Trump’s vision of low-cost colonialism bears echoes of the fiscal receivership model pioneered by Theodore Roosevelt, which did not end well for most concerned.   

Mexico will be seeking “alternative ways” to support the Cuban people, said President Claudia Sheinbaum last Friday following the Trump administration’s decision to impose additional tariffs on any countries that sell or supply oil to Cuba. As we previously warned, it was only a matter of time before Mexico fell into the US’ crosshairs over its shipments of oil to Cuba.

Following the US’ January 3 attack on Venezuela and subsequent blockade of Venezuelan shipments of oil to Cuba, Mexico briefly became the largest remaining supplier of oil to the besieged island nation. But that came to an end last Tuesday when Sheinbaum announced a (temporary) halt to Mexico’s oil shipments to Cuba.

Sheinbaum insisted that the pause in oil shipments was merely for technical reasons, stressing that the decision was a sovereign one that had nothing to do with the rising heat coming from Washington. But nobody’s buying that.

Economic Strangulation

Last Thursday, the US announced a raft of new measures intended to starve Cuba’s embattled economy of energy supplies. In a new executive order, the Trump administration threatened to impose additional tariffs on any countries that supply oil to the island, even indirectly. They include Mexico, the island’s largest remaining supplier which also happens to be the US’ largest trade partner. As already flagged in previous posts, the US has plenty of leverage over Mexico.

Even before the US blocked supply lines between Venezuela and Cuba, energy supplies in Cuba were already chronically short, with the island nation suffering days-long blackouts during 2024 and 2025. According to the Financial Times, Cuba has only enough oil to last 15 to 20 days at current levels of demand and domestic production.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel reacted to the latest escalation by accusing Trump of wanting to suffocate the Cuban economy and calling his government “fascist, criminal and genocidal.”

For her part, Sheinbaum warned that the latest measure could “trigger a far-reaching humanitarian crisis,” directly affecting hospitals, food and other basic services of the Cuban people.”

“Mexico will look for different alternatives, obviously in the defence of Mexico as well as, obviously, to help the Cuban people in a humanitarian way who are going through a difficult time, all in accordance with what has historically been our tradition of solidarity and international respect.”

Faced with this scenario, the Mexican president stressed that Mexico will maintain its historical position of solidarity with Cuba and explained that her government will seek to resolve the problem through diplomatic channels. To that end, she instructed Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) to establish immediate contact with the US government, in order to learn precisely the scope of the decree published by Trump.

“And also to make it known that a humanitarian crisis for the Cuban people must be prevented,” Sheinbaum said. But that is precisely what the US is looking to bring about, as Washington presumably explained to Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. The goal, as Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the UK Labour Party, warns in the tweet below, is “to starve Cuba into submission… This is economic warfare, plain and simple.”

The US has declared Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat", authorising new sanctions and tightening its illegal blockade.

Trump is trying to starve Cuba into submission — and millions of people will suffer.

This is economic warfare, plain and simple. Hands off Cuba!

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) January 31, 2026

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently called it, “economic statecraft”, in direct reference to the US’ recent controlled demolition of Iran’s national currency, the rial, which continues to crash in value to this day. The attack on the rial in early January sparked nationwide protests that were initially largely peaceful but which CIA, Mossad and MI6 assets helped blow up into a violent insurgency. From Bessent’s own mouth:

“It’s worked because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the streets…This is economic statecraft. No shots fired. Things are moving in a very positive way here.”

Bessent’s comments were “breathtakingly stupid and arrogant”, noted Yves in her post yesterday on the likelihood of the US attacking Iran in the coming days:

The US taking credit will facilitate Iran setting up mechanisms with allies who do not want a war (which now might even include the Saudis on a stealth basis) to defend the currency. It also tells local businessmen that the currency plunge was due not fundamentals but a raid, which even absent external support might blunt the effectiveness of any second attempt.

In the end, the regime change operation in Iran failed, mainly because the Iranian authorities were able to jam the Starlink connections that the CIA, Mossad and MI6 were using to coordinate the insurgency. Now, the Trump administration, with Marco Rubio naturally serving as point person, has its sights set on Cuba’s Communist regime.

Given its weaker military force and its even more acute economic crisis, including chronic energy shortages that the US blockade is already exacerbating, Cuba makes for a softer target than Iran. To justify its latest raft of sanctions, the US has tried to portray Cuba as a safe haven for Hamas and Hezbollah, just as it did with Venezuela, again without providing a shred of evidence.

In his attempt to block oil shipments to Cuba, Donald Trump now claims the country is a safe haven for Hamas and Hezbollah, without presenting any evidence. Cubans say it’s complete nonsense. The real story? Hundreds of Palestinian students training to be doctors in Havana. pic.twitter.com/3X24dhF6mN

— Belly of the Beast (@bellybeastcuba) February 1, 2026

“We’re being asked to believe Cuba is Hamas, so Washington needs to strangle it to death in self-defence,” notes Tim Foley. “The fact that Washington has been pursuing regime change in Cuba for generations, we are told, is merely a coincidence. The lies get dumber and dumber with each new imperial power grab.”

But the fallout of the US’s economic warfare, measured in economic destruction and human lives, continues to grow, though it is largely downplayed, if not totally covered up, by the Western media, as we reported a few weeks ago:

[I]n August 2024, Lancet Global Health published the first study to examine the effects of sanctions on age-specific mortality rates in cross-country panel data across most countries, using methods designed to address causal identification in observational data. The authors analysed the effect on health of sanctions using a panel dataset of age-specific mortality rates and sanctions episodes for 152 countries between 1971 and 2021

The study’s findings were shocking: broad economic sanctions, often depicted as a less violent alternative to war, are responsible for an estimated 564,000 deaths each year – most of them children under the age of five. In some years, the death toll was more than a million. With the notable exceptions of Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times and Al Jazeera, most legacy media in the West did not even touch the story.

A cursory search of the BBC News website brings up nothing. Same goes for the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, El País and Le Monde. Even the two main Western news agencies, Reuters and the Associated Press, didn’t bother covering it.

In other words, one of the world’s most respected medical journals had published a study showing that sanctions imposed by the US and EU since 1970 are associated with an estimated 38 million deaths — several times more than those killed in direct conflict — and most Western media had simply chosen to ignore it. As Yves might say, quelle surprise!

A Long History of Regime Change Failure

The US wants to topple the Cuban government for myriad reasons. As Foley notes, it’s been trying to do so since the Cuban revolution in 1959, including through multiple assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. Until today, it has been a long history of regime change failure.

Since the US’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion, there have been embargoes, blockades, an open-door policy for people leaving the island, the funding of opposition forces, boycotts in international organizations and, of course, the 13 days of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, in which the world came perilously close to all-out nuclear war.

The fact that Marco Rubio is both US secretary of state and national security advisor to President Trump paints an even bigger target on Cuba’s back. Rubio’s parents may have fled the island in 1956, three years before the Revolution, when the country was in the brutal grip of Fulgencio Batista, a dictator trained at the School of the Americas and financed by Washington, but it is the communist government that has always been the target of Rubio’s attentions.

There are two obvious reasons for that: money and power. As the Cuban writer Abel Prieto once wrote, “In Miami, hatred of the Revolution is a business. And Rubio is its best salesman.”

Another obvious reason for Trump’s moves against Cuba is that his administration is in desperate need of an easy, or at least easier, win — especially now that regime change in Iran is likely off the cards, at least in the short run, as Yves explained yesterday. This is also the view of Egor Toropov, a political analyst at Moscow’s HSE University, who told Russia’s Tsargrad TV (machine translated):

The Islamic Republic is a difficult enough target for a small, victorious invasion by Trump, who wants to bend as many countries as possible to his will. Consider, for example, that the population in Iran is three times larger than in Venezuela. In addition, the overthrow of the Cuban government will bring Trump very significant domestic political points.

After all, in the 2024 elections, Latin Americans, who for the most part support the overthrow of communist regimes in Latin America, voted for Trump and for the Republicans. However, in 2025, in a number of local elections, especially in the state of New Jersey in the gubernatorial election, Latin Americans turned back to the Democrats in fairly large numbers, the analyst noted.

Trump also desperately needs a diversion from his myriad domestic crises, including the ever blossoming Epstein scandal. But what chances does his administration have of toppling Cuba’s communist regime, given it has not even replaced the Chavista government in Venezuela?

It’s hard to say. On the one hand, Cuba’s economy is in even direr straits than Venezuela’s — again, largely due to the suffocating US sanctions imposed on the economy over the past six decades. The aim of those sanctions, as set out in a 1960 memorandum, was “to weaken the economic life of Cuba . . . [to deny] money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

The US has long achieved all those aims apart from the overarching one: the overthrow of the Cuban government.

Economic conditions on the island nation, meanwhile, have deteriorated rapidly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Its largest source of export revenues was, until recently, the medical missions it sends to dozens of countries round the world. So, Rubio’s State Department began imposing secondary sanctions on any countries, almost all of them in the Global South, using those missions, arguing that they represent forced slave labour.

If Trump’s blockade is successful in starving Cuba of all energy supplies — and the only realistic way of preventing that is if Russia and/or China began sending naval-escorted convoys of oil tankers to the island, which, unlike Venezuela, is a BRICS partner country* — the humanitarian crisis will quickly deteriorate. The pressure on the government could become unbearable.

That said, no small country on planet Earth has resisted the US empire’s aggression as effectively or as resolutely as Cuba. This smallish island of 11 million people positioned just 90 miles off the Floridan coast has withstood everything that Washington has thrown at it: invasion, assassination, starvation. Now, the US seeks to deprive it of every single molecule of oil and gas that was heading to the island — all in the name of “freedom”.

The notion that the US would bring "freedom" to Cuba is actually obscene. The US effectively controlled Cuba for half a century before the revolution, and ran it as a dictatorship characterised by gangsterism, political repression, sex tourism, racial hierarchy and mass poverty.

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) February 1, 2026

The monsters who are currently calling for US regime-change in Cuba *do not care* about the Cuban people. If they cared about the Cuban people they would be calling instead to end the cruel US blockade which is *explicitly* intended to create mass misery and starvation.

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) February 1, 2026

Just days ago, thousands of Cubans were marching in the streets, not in opposition to the Miguel Díaz-Canel government but in solidarity with the people of Gaza, as Israel continues its genocide (h/t Chas).

🇧🇷🇨🇺 Activista brasileño @thiagoavilabr muestra la realidad de los miles de jóvenes cubanos en las calles para defender su patria frente a las medidas y amenazas de Trump.

Él vino para enseñarte la Cuba que no te cuentan los grandes medios:pic.twitter.com/f2G2H8hHoT

— El Necio (@ElNecio_Cuba) February 2, 2026

The march was a reminder that even under siege, Cuba has always stood with oppressed peoples around the world — from beating back South Africa’s CIA-sponsored invasion of Angola (1975-91) to helping defeat apartheid in South Africa, to supporting Palestine and sending doctors to the frontlines of epidemics and natural disasters around the world.

Cuba was one of the first places Nelson Mandala would visit following his release from prison in 1991. Mandela said:

I was still in prison when I first heard of the massive help which the Cuban international forces were giving to the people of Angola. The help was of such a scale that it was difficult for us to believe it, when the Angolans were under attack by the combined forces of South Africa, the FALA [Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola] who were financed by the CIA, mercenaries, UNITA [National Union for the Total Independence of Angola], and Zaire in 1975…

The decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces in Angola destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor… ´[The Cuban intervention] was the first time that a country had come from another continent not to take something away, but to help Africans to achieve their freedom.

Interestingly, the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzi, is confident that Cuba will continue to resist, even as the Trump administration ratchets the pressure:

Before, when the US imposed order on its “backyard”, as they like to call it, such as in Nicaragua and Panama, at least they justified it with democratic slogans about liberating the people from a dictatorship. Today, all the talk is about resources and influence, as we saw in Venezuela. In Venezuela, there was without doubt betrayal, it is spoken about openly. Part of the senior leadership essentially betrayed the president.

This is presumably in reference to interim President Delcy González and her brother, Jorge, the leader of the national assembly. According to (largely unnamed) sources cited by Western media outlets, the siblings sold out Maduro to the US in order that Delcy would take his place.

To my knowledge, there is still no definitive proof of this — at least not in the public domain. Though it is perfectly possible, I find it hard to imagine that the Rodriguez siblings betrayed Maduro, especially given their family’s grisly background vis-a-vis the CIA as well as the fact that all the other main players, including the Minister of Interior, Diosdado Cabello, and the Minister of Defence Vladimir Padrino — appear to be on the same page.

Delcy herself has claimed that “Washington gave us 15 minutes to respond and comply with their demands otherwise they would kill us. The threats are constant, the blackmail is constant.”

Those claims, while perfectly believable, are also unproven. There is so much we don’t know, and may never know, about what happened on January 3. One thing that is clear is that Western media accounts should be taken with a generous pinch of salt.

Reviving Roosevelt’s “Fiscal Receivership” Model of Colonial Conquest

So, what does the Trump administration hope to achieve with another (partial) regime change operation in its direct neighbourhood?

Presumably, it seeks to govern Cuba’s economy and finances remotely, just as it claims to be governing Venezuela’s. In the case of Venezuela, the proceeds from oil sales are being channelled into special accounts managed by the US. That money can only be spent with US approval, meaning that repaying Venezuela’s debts to Russia and China are out of the question.

Though Cuba doesn’t boast the same mineral wealth as Venezuela, opening its largely closed economy to liberalisation and privatisation will offer juicy opportunities to US corporations and investors, including, presumably, many in the Cuban diaspora.

However, as Oliver Stuenkel and Adrian Feinberg explain in an interesting piece for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, President Donald Trump’s vision of “low-cost extraction” — managing the sale and proceeds of Venezuelan oil without US administrators or troops on the ground — bears echoes of the “fiscal receivership” model of empire pioneered by Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century. And that did not end well for most concerned, especially the locals:

Between 1904 and the 1930s, the United States supervised fiscal receiverships in several Latin American and Caribbean countries, most notably the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Panama. These arrangements did not amount to formal protectorates but often functioned like them in practice. US officials assumed control over key revenue streams—most commonly customs houses, which at the time were the primary source of state income—and in some cases also exercised authority over internal taxation and budgeting. Local governments retained nominal sovereignty and formal political institutions, but decisions over revenue collection, debt servicing, and public spending increasingly flowed through Washington.

[H]istorical studies show that, on average, countries under US fiscal supervision did not experience sustained increases in public revenues. In some instances, revenues declined. The promise that external technocratic oversight would deliver “good governance” proved illusory. Just as important, American investors—often assumed to be the main beneficiaries—rarely reaped long-term gains. Beyond sporadic debt repayments, US companies faced continued hostile, unstable political environments that undermined durable investment and inflicted reputational costs on them.

An even more important lesson for Trump: the intensity of local opposition in places like the Dominican Republic and Haiti meant that a full US military occupation was ultimately needed to maintain the colonial order.

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* While both Russia and China have offered to support Cuba and have voiced strongly worded criticism of the US’ siege of the island, there are currently no signs that either party is willing to break the siege by dispatching naval-escorted tankers. Yesterday, Sergei Lavrov said Moscow will continue to provide “political and material support” to the country. However, it’s unclear whether that “material support” includes the provision of oil and gas.