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The Ultimate Insult: As Washington Starves Cuba of Energy (And Most Everything Else), It Offers $6 Million in Humanitarian Aid

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The US State Department insists that US restrictions on oil in Cuba are not amplifying the need for humanitarian aid there.

After depriving Cuba of oil for more than a month, first through a military blockade of Venezuelan oil exports and then through the threat of tariffs on any third country that supplies the island with oil, the US has pushed Cuba to the verge of energy collapse. According to a report published late Sunday by the Spanish news agency EFE, “citing two sources”, Havana has warned international airlines operating on the island that it would soon run out of aviation fuel:

The official Notam (warning to aviators) message from the Cuban authorities to pilots and controllers specifies that the kerosene deficit affects all international airports in Cuba. The validity period of the notification is for one month, from February 10 to March 11.

“JET A1 FUEL NOT AVBL” (fuel for A1 aircraft not available), reads the message Notam coded as it currently appears in the database of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)…

At the moment the affected airlines – mainly American, Spanish, Panamanian and Mexican – have not publicly communicated how they are going to deal with this situation, which could generate alterations in routes, frequencies and schedules, at least in the short term…

However, this fact is not new in Cuba. In previous similar situations – both in the special period in the 90s and in temporary bottlenecks in recent months – airlines had overcome the problem by rearranging their routes from the island with extra stopovers to refuel in Mexico or the Dominican Republic.

Most flights connecting the island with the outside world cover routes to Florida, in the United States (Miami, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale), Spain (Madrid), Panama (Panama City) and Mexico (Mexico City, Merida, Cancun).

Cuba also has regular connections with Bogotá (Colombia), Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and Caracas (Venezuela), among other Latin American capitals.

The announcement may affect the already battered national tourism sector, stranded in a crisis since the pandemic due to the consequences of COVID-19, U.S. sanctions and the country’s economic problems, which weigh on the quality of supply and service.

Several countries had recently warned their citizens about the risks of traveling to Cuba in the current circumstances, due to the blackouts – and their consequences – and the escalation of tensions with the United States.

Economic Paralysis

It’s not just Cuba’s tourism industry that is suffering the effects of Washington’s total energy blockade, which is rapidly exacerbating the island’s year-and-a-half-long energy crisis. Life in Cuba is gradually being paralysed, as public transportation, gas stations, factories, hospitals and universities seize up. As Mexico’s La Jornada notes, “Electricity is the life blood that moves a country. Lack of energy paralyses a nation”.

The US is not just targeting tankers close to Cuban shores; as the report below shows, it is also intercepting tankers on the other side of the planet that are allegedly transporting Venezuelan crude. The ship in question, Aquila II, departed from Venezuelan waters in early January as part of a flotilla of vessels and was carrying about 700,000 barrels of Venezuelan heavy crude bound for China, reports Reuters:

Hegseth said the Aquila II was operating in defiance of the U.S. “quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean… The Department of War tracked and hunted this vessel from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean. ..You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us.”

Another example of US public funds being put to good use.

There is a silver lining for the Cuban people, however. According to CNN Español, the US State Department has announced $6 million (that’s million with an “m”) in humanitarian assistance to the island nation, to help alleviate the pain of the siege the US military and Treasury Department are imposing on the island (machine translated):

The aid will be distributed through Caritas, a network of Catholic charities, and the Catholic Church, Jeremy Lewin, the top State Department official in charge of foreign assistance, said Thursday. Lewin told reporters that there had been no direct engagement with the Cuban government on the issue.

The Trump administration has cut off oil supplies to Cuba from Venezuela and last week threatened to impose tariffs on nations that export oil to Cuba.

The truly hallucinatory part:

Lewin rejected the idea that US restrictions on oil in Cuba were amplifying the need for humanitarian aid there. He argued that the island was still affected by Hurricane Melissa and that oil was being “hoarded by the state monopoly” and the “security service.”

“The idea that any change in the last few weeks on oil is responsible for what’s happening in Cuba is simply not true,” he said.

Which begs the $6 million question: why do it then?

The CNN article even features a clip of an interview with an energy expert who completely contradicts Lewin’s absurd claim. The expert says that while around 80% of the energy generated by Cuba’s thermoelectric plants comes from domestic crude, which will largely continue to flow, it is diesel fuel that the island is rapidly running out of — thanks to the US’ naval blockade and tariff threats:

Cuba consumes 22,000 barrels of diesel per day and that diesel is needed for transportation — for buses, trucks, tractors, boats, water pipeline pumping stations, distributed power. It was just announced that a sugar mill does not have diesel to run its machines and so they are looking for machete-wielding cane cutters.

Tob help cushion the blow, the US State Department will apparently be sending Cuba six million dollars worth of “canned tuna, rice, beans, pasta, things like that, basic necessities, small solar lamps that also allow you to charge your phone, hygiene kits, basic things like that.” Presumably much of that money will be squandered in admin fees, transaction fees and run-of-the-mill beltway corruption.

The question is: why bother?

If you’re going to starve a nation into submission, or at least try to, why send it a few little scraps along the way?

To prolong the pain?

Perhaps Marco Rubio has developed a conscience and is having pangs of guilt about obliterating what’s left of the decrepit economy of his late parents’ nation, and the inevitable lives that will be lost in the process? Nah, that’s not conceivable.

Fake Negotiations?

In fact, according to a new article by Ryan Grim, Noah Kulwin, and José Luis Grenados Ceja for Drop Site News, Rubio has apparently been leading Trump down the primrose path regarding US negotiations with the Cuban government. Which, let’s face it, is far more believable:

To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the United States is deep in negotiations with Cuban government officials as the US applies maximum pressure to the island. “We’re talking to the people from Cuba, the highest people in Cuba, to see what happens,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Sunday, February 1. “I think we’re going to make a deal with Cuba.”

Cuban leaders, meanwhile, have said they are open to negotiations on everything from human rights to democracy to tourism and direct foreign investment. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in a recent press conference that Cuba is willing to engage in dialogue with the United States on any issue, provided talks take place without pressure or preconditions, on the basis of respect for Cuban sovereignty. And Trump is no stranger to the island’s potential for American companies, having himself long held a registered trademark for a Trump Havana property that he has annually renewed.

All the evidence would seem to suggest that the opportunity for Trump to strike a historic deal is at hand. But, despite the president’s claims, there are and have been no negotiations involving high-level officials between Havana and Washington, according to five Cuban and American officials, all of whom asked for anonymity given the sensitivity of the Cuba-U.S. relationship.

When it comes to Trump’s claims of those talks, it turns out he isn’t lying. Instead, sources tell Drop Site, he’s being lied to. “He’s saying that because that’s what Marco is telling him,” said a senior Trump official, referring to an internal effort by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make Trump believe that the U.S. and Cuba are engaged in serious negotiations without ever doing so. The idea, the source said, is that in a few weeks or months, Rubio will be able to claim that the talks were futile because of Cuban intransigence. With diplomatic off-ramps being blocked, this would make Rubio’s vision of regime change the only path forward for an administration loath to reverse course on anything.

One thing we do know for sure is that the damage from the US’ economic strangulation of Cuba will eventually be measured in lives — lots of lives. The only study to have examined the impact of US-led sanctions and on age-specific mortality rates in cross-country panel data across most countries found that they had cost the lives of approximately 38 million people since 1970 — several times more than those killed in direct conflict.

As we previously reported, that study was published in 2024 by the highly regarded Lancet Global Health, and then duly ignored by the legacy media in the West. Even now, much of the coverage is treating the Cuban government as equally culpable for the energy crisis while totally downplaying, and thereby normalising, the US’s blockade.

In the following clip, of a BBC interview of the Cuban ambassador to the UK, the interviewer accuses the Cuban government of “hav[ing] no plan” for responding to the US’ siege warfare — as if a nation of 11 million people that has been brutally impoverished and hollowed out by 65 years of US sanctions and embargoes should be in any position to defend itself from a total energy embargo.

A History of Resilience

Cuba’s communist government has been on the sharp end of US economic and financial warfare for 65 years, and has somehow managed to survive until today. In the 1990s, when it was cut off from trade with its historic ally, the Soviet Union, Cuba responded to the collapse in imports of petroleum and petroleum-based products by embracing ecologically sustainable agriculture, with surprising success:

But today the situation is arguably even worse, since the economic privations being imposed by the US come on top of the economic hangover left over from the COVID-19 pandemic, from which the country never recovered. As more and more commentators are noting, what we are now seeing is the “Gazification” of Cuba.

Since December, Cuba has literally been starved of oil. First, the US cut the country off from its biggest provider of oil, Venezuela, after illegal kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. That was on January 3. Then, at the end of January Washington threatened to impose tariffs on any nation that traded oil with Cuba. It’s not as if Cuba needs much of the stuff, as NC reader Polar Scientist noted in a recent comment:

The “funny” part here is that Cuban oil consumption is so minute, 112,000-120,000 barrels/day (and Venezuela + Mexico together covered only around 50%) that escorting one Suezmax tanker to Cuba twice a month would be enough to “break the blockade”.

This is a key point: it would take only two or three countries to break this blockade. Two obvious candidates are China and Russia. For its part, China has less to worry about from Trump’s tariff threats than just about any other nation. As we saw in its recent showdown with Washington over rare earth minerals, Beijing can more than hold its own in any tit-for-tat tariff escalation with the US.

Also, Cuba, unlike Venezuela, is a BRICS associate partner. As the Cuban commentator El Necio argues, if Cuba is hung out to dry, the message to the Global South will be that BRICS membership counts for little, if anything, especially as the US becomes increasingly assertive on the global chessboard:

“[W]e could throw all multilateral analyses in the trash if, at this crucial moment, the BRICS allow themselves to leave an official partner at the mercy of an illegal US economic blockade. The biggest test the BRICS will face as a bloc will be rescuing Cuba.”

Moscow could also send a tanker or two, though it would risk inflaming tensions with the US just as the two countries are locked in negotiations to end the Ukraine conflict. That said, those negotiations appear to be going nowhere as the US increasingly targets Russia’s shadow fleet. Russia certainly has oil to spare for Cuba as well as the capacity to provide naval protection. Plus, it’s already on the receiving end of just about every US and EU sanction imaginable.

As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov notes in the clip below, “everyone is already banned from buying Russian oil and gas” anyway. Russian companies are “blatantly being pushed out of Venezuela” while the US accuses Cuba of posing a threat to US interests and Moscow of pursuing a “malicious policy” in the Caribbean. None of this bodes well for US-Russian cooperation, Lavrov notes.

A few days ago, Russia’s ambassador to Cuba Viktor Coronelli said in an interview with state news agency RIA that Russia has repeatedly supplied oil to Cuba in recent years and will continue to do so.

Beijing also reiterated its support of Cuban sovereignty and its firm opposition to “foreign interference. “China will give, as always, support and assistance, within our capabilities,” said China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jia.

There are also plenty of other oil producing countries that owe Havana a favour or two:

Two countries that could, indeed arguably should, lend a helping hand are Brazil and Mexico, Latin America’s two largest economies. This is, after all, their direct neighbourhood, and the Trump administration’s “Donroe Doctrine” is as much a threat to them as it is to Cuba or Venezuela. Both countries are relatively oil-rich and have left-of-centre governments closely tied to Cuba — a reality that, in the case of Brazil, could change in the not too distant future.

Mexico was plying Cuba with regular shipments of oil until the Trump administration made it a de facto criminal offence, punishable with higher tariffs. For Mexico, that is a serious threat given more than 80% of its exports go to the US. However, while Mexico may have ceased exporting oil to Cuba, it has dispatched two military vessels with over 800 tons of food and basic supplies. Barring interceptions, the boats should dock in Havana in the next two to three days.

In her Monday morning press conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum described the US’ latest blockade of Cuba as “unjust”. That’s putting it mildly. What the US is doing is exacting collective punishment against the 11 million people of Cuba, which is a war crime under international humanitarian law, explicitly forbidden by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 87 of the Third Geneva Convention.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, meanwhile, is only providing platitudes. While Cuba faces a total energy blockade, the government of Latin America’s largest economy has so far done nothing except issue a mild condemnation. In his latest speech, at a PT party event, Lula asked the crowd how the party — tellingly, not the country — could show its solidarity with the people of Cuba.

In a similar vein, Lula said in a recent interview that the return of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, to Venezuela is not a primary concern. It is much more important, he said, that democracy in Venezuela is bolstered, the Venezuelan people who have fled the country in recent years can return, and Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, can begin drilling oil with greater efficiency.

Lula made no reference to the way in which democracy was apparently being returned to Venezuela — i.e. at the barrel of a US gun and via the kidnapping of the country’s head of state. Also, as readers may recall, this is not the first time Lula has left Maduro hanging. In 2024, he blocked Venezuela’s application to become a BRICS associate member.

As the Argentine geopolitical analyst Bruno Sgarzini notes, Lula’s limp words and lack of action on both Venezuela and Cuba leave the door wide open for an emboldened US to carry out similar operations in other countries in the region — including, if necessary, Brazil.

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11 comments

  2. The Rev Kev

    That is really weak tea on the part of Lula. He is actually siding with the Neocons and repeating CIA talking points and am dissapointed. I don’t think that he realizes that by doing this, he does not get brownie points with Washington. By demonstrating such weakness and fecklessness, that it makes him a priority target by the Neocons to be regime changed instead.

  3. Carolinian

    While Trump will surely go down in history as our weirdest president, being horrid to Cuba is a long standing tradition of our “great” USA including the sainted Kennedy brothers. It’s interesting though that he has the goal of a “Trump Havana.” Meanwhile Rubio is a creature of the old line Republican party that Trump was supposedly against but had to keep onboard to support his various grifts. Back at the convention Kirn said the old school wanted Rubio to be VP.

    Trump–or his handlers–want to bring back the Cold War without the body bags. We’ll see how long they can get away with that. More than likely a disaster, military or economic, will put on the brakes–perhaps this week on the other side of the world.

    1. Kouros

      Obama opened up relations with Cuba and entered JPCOA. The high mark of US foreign policy. Trump is a monster, a narcisistic sociopath. ANd an exponent of the American right wingers.

      It will not be long until American workers and poor will be again seing the smoking machine guns of the US paramilitaries, like under the Rockefeller in early 1900s…

  4. JonnyJames

    More sad news. Makes me nostalgic for the USSR. Now, no one will come to Cuba’s aid and the Cubans will suffer even more hardship. The US regime is full of sadistic, genocidal perverts, so this is to be expected.

    So much for Brazil and BRICS solidarity, no one wants to take a risk to help, and I agree with the conclusion: this will only embolden the reckless and power-drunk US regime to go further. The Rev makes a good point, Lula’s demonstration of weakness only makes him a more attractive target for the cowardly warmongers. .

  5. chuck roast

    I always liked the word ‘gusanos’. It seemed the perfect word to describe the privileged classes beating feet to Miami. We don’t see or hear it much anymore. Too bad. Not only does it have a nice ring to it, it’s a great descriptor. But IMO it has always been a thing. It is now more than ever a thing, and we should employ it in a more expansionary manner.

    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      Yep, it’s certainly a fitting descriptor. Now that we’re living in what appears to be a new golden age of the gusano, I think I might be using the word more as well.

      1. JonnyJames

        I heard Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal use that term a couple years back, I was not familiar with it, but yes it’s very fitting. The only gusanos I want to see are those at the bottom of a Mexcal bottle.
        https://www.happysliquor.com/products/mezcal-con-gusano-monte-alban-750ml?srsltid=AfmBOoqS3adT4atYI18r8G0JdIeqgSELhV8PP4VZx3OcYJbQY9CZsSli

        (Sadly, my brother is married to a daughter of hardcore gusanos and she carries all the biases and misinformation that brings, so I never talk politics with her)

  6. DGE

    A few days ago, there was a malfunction in the operations of the PIX system of instantaneous payments in Brazil. You know, the one that has drawn global attention over the past year or so, and which caused the USG to launch a bogus investigation on it because their precious credit card companies are getting outcompeted.

    Currently, about half of all consumer transactions are conducted in PIX, which is a lot. So you can imagine a failure in processing payments is a major hassle for business. Well, the malfunction was part of a broader glitch on cloud computing, and I was surprised then to learn it was rooted on issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which currently is the main source of Bezos’ money.

    Why am I starting a comment on a post about the embargo on Cuba with this story? Because it has finally dawned upon me how dependent Brazil’s critical infrastructure is on the vagaries of a US corporation. I had been naïve? silly? oblivious? enough to assume our Central Bank had its own data centres to sustain PIX, but no, we’ve outsourced it to a glorified retailer’s cloud service.

    I think few people appreciate, outside of LatAm countries, how dependent on the US and its corporations we’ve become. In the case of Brazil, all our military officers are trained in the US: it’s part and parcel of a successful career to be groomed by US Armed Forces’ academies and institutes. Our comprador elite, perhaps even more than the European ones, is completely beholden to US interests, hobnobbing with their own elites and aping the worst trends issuing from that country – anti-vaxxers, neopentecostal Theology of Prosperity, Zionism, libertarianism, right-wing populism, you name it: you’ll find enthusiastic elite support here for every harebrained worldview espoused or sponsored by US elites. The corporate media here is completely US-besotted, being supportive even of atrocities we have no stake in, like the Gazan Genocide. And they have complete domination of the news cycle, seeing as we don’t have a vigorous alternative media.

    So there you have your reason for Lula’s timidity: it’s just another instance of materially enforced conformity along the lines of Sheinbaum’s. I don’t think the US Ambassador even needed to phone him. It’s the political equivalent of the Chomsky-Herman manufacturing of consent: Lula simply knows how much havoc Trump can cause Brazil just by calling a few tech bros and issuing a few orders to the US Treasury’s OFAC. He, and the other policymakers, have already internalised the relationship Brazil and the US have, know which side is the vulnerable one, and have probably gamed the consequences of rebellion.

    Lula, and all centre-of-left LatAm leaders, feel they can only act as stewards of the status quo, try to put a more humane, socially conscious face on capitalism, cross their fingers and stall for time, possibly hoping or assuming the US will implode at some point, as it so often looks like being on the verge of doing these days.

    Make no mistake: LatAm is the US’ backyard at this point. It would take a major endeavour in movement-building, and a determination to endure hardship, to break free from their grips, even for a country like Brazil. Lula is 80 and other than in the very beginning of his career, has always been a bit of an appeaser. That has taken him very far and allowed him to outmanoeuvre the right in many occasions, at high cost for him. But it forces him to stay on a narrow lane of milquetoast social welfare policies to alleviate extreme poverty, and nothing like true nation-building.

    I’ve always voted for him and the Workers’ Party, and will continue to do so. I like Lula as a human being. But I’m far to the left of him and PT. The problem is that the Brazilian left is essentially a “social movement” left. There’s no real roadmap to power, and no real acknowledgement that elites are an enemy to be defeated, not a partner to be accommodated. Believe it or not, there’s nothing of substance to the left of PT. There’s a nominally Communist Party that is more like a waiting room for politicians aspiring to join PT, and which supports PT through hell and high water; a PT break-off that’s going the same way; and a handful of Trotskyite micro-parties that still think in terms of DiaMat. I don’t know of any outfit trying to garner popular support around a national project that breaks with our present of being a commodity supplier.

    So don’t be surprised at Lula’s spinelessness. Even if it emboldens the right and the US to pull regime change in the near future (election year here), that future is uncertain until it happens, but brutal retaliation for noncompliance is certain. Lula has never been the kind to take this kind of political gamble.

    1. Kouros

      Edgar Snow and Red Star Rising over China is a good template for action, but I don’t think it is possible in all cultures.

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