Cuban sorrow: on U.S. actions on Cuba

Even as the world is feeling the pinch of the ill-thought-out and cruel attacks by the United States and its West Asian loose-cannon ally, Israel, on Iran, an equally heinous imperial act is under way in the Caribbean, drawing little attention. The Trump administration has effectively blockaded Cuba’s fuel supplies to pressure regime change. In actions taken since December 2025, interdicting Venezuelan oil shipments, threatening punitive tariffs on any country supplying fuel and deterring Russian diesel and crude oil supplies, the U.S. has strangled a petroleum-dependent country, where oil drives 83% of power generation. The consequences have been devastating. There have been three grid collapses in March 2026, even as garbage is piling up in Havana and other cities, perishable food is rotting, and industry and government offices have shut. Donald Trump’s actions are criminally illegal by international law. He claims that Cuba is “seeing the end”, boasts that he will have the “honour” of “taking” Cuba, and has called on the Cuban government to “make a deal before it’s too late”, without specifying any terms.

The actions against Cuba must be seen against a six-decade long U.S. embargo — but what Cubans term a blockade — ever since the revolution nationalised U.S.-owned enterprises in the early 1960s. The U.S.’s trade embargo in 1962 was progressively strengthened as the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 effectively conscripted the global business community into enforcing it. Meanwhile, Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism — removed by Barack Obama but restored by Mr. Trump and lacking any rational basis — has cut the country off from international banking. That these coercive measures persisted much after the Cold War reveals that their true purpose is not U.S. national security, but the appeasement of the right-wing Cuban-American community in Florida, led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, son of Cuban émigrés, for whom regime change in Havana is a lifelong ambition. Mr. Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela, including capturing a sitting President and seizing control of its oil, was itself partly designed to sever Cuba’s primary fuel lifeline under the doctors-for-fuel arrangement. The pattern is clear: impunity in Venezuela emboldened the Trump administration to asphyxiate Cuba and impunity in Cuba has accompanied America’s war on Iran. Each unchallenged act of imperial overreach normalises the next, threatening not just vulnerable nations in the U.S. orbit but also the very framework of international order. The world, including India, must not remain silent and have the gumption to condemn these actions and provide humanitarian assistance, under the aegis of the United Nations, for the people of Cuba.