Cuba is facing what its own president has called the country's most severe test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The trigger was not a Cuban policy failure but an event 1,500 kilometres away: the US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, which severed the subsidised oil lifeline Havana had relied on for two decades.
How the blockade tightened
The Trump administration had already reversed Biden-era openings toward Cuba on returning to office in January 2025, reinstating Cuba's designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism and reimposing a ban on US tourism. But the pressure escalated sharply after Maduro's removal. On 29 January 2026, Trump signed an executive order declaring Cuba's government an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to US national security and authorising tariffs on any country supplying it with oil — a measure aimed squarely at cutting off alternative suppliers now that Venezuelan crude was gone.
On 1 May 2026, a further executive order (14404) dramatically broadened the sanctions regime, for the first time authorising secondary sanctions against foreign companies and banks anywhere in the world that do business with the Cuban government or military-run conglomerate GAESA, which controls an estimated 40% of the island's economy. Mexico suspended oil shipments to Cuba in January to avoid the new tariffs; Canadian airlines halted flights amid the fuel shortage.
Russia: solidarity in words, not barrels
Moscow has been vocal in its support for Havana, with senior officials repeatedly denouncing the US embargo and pledging "unwavering" solidarity. In practice, that support has been thin. As of May 2026, only a single Russian tanker — the Anatoly Kolodkin, carrying about 730,000 barrels — had actually reached Cuba in the entire year, enough to cover roughly seven to ten days of national consumption. A second promised tanker, the Universal, spent weeks stranded in the Atlantic, blocked by US, EU and UK sanctions before ever reaching Cuban waters. Russia's own foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, conceded in April that Moscow's oil assistance would "probably last a couple of months," adding candidly, "I am not a specialist."
The gap between rhetoric and delivery reflects Russia's own constraints: sanctioned tankers face growing difficulty finding insurance, ports and buyers willing to touch them, and Moscow's wartime economy and military priorities leave less spare capacity for far-flung solidarity shipments than during the Cold War.
China: smaller, but more tangible
China has not offered to replace Cuba's lost oil supply, but it has become the most consequential outside actor in one specific area: solar power. Over roughly two years, Chinese financing, equipment and technical support have helped Cuba install close to 1 gigawatt of new solar capacity, part of a planned network of 92 medium-sized solar parks intended to reach nearly 2,000 megawatts by 2028. Renewable energy's share of Cuba's electricity mix has tripled, from about 3% in 2024 to roughly 10% by mid-2026.
It is a real but partial fix: solar cannot power a grid at night without expensive battery storage Cuba mostly lacks, so the blackouts that stretch through overnight hours have continued largely unabated even as daytime generation improves. US intelligence assessments have also flagged a strategic dimension to China's presence: facilities on the island, including one at Bejucal, are believed to support Chinese signals-intelligence collection aimed at the southeastern United States, giving Beijing reasons beyond economics to keep Havana's government intact.
Protests, aid offers, and an uncertain endgame
The blackouts have produced rare public displays of anger in a country where organised dissent is tightly restricted, including street protests and residents banging pots and setting fires in Havana neighbourhoods in May 2026. President Miguel Díaz-Canel — Cuba's first non-Castro head of state since 1959, in power since 2018 — has consistently framed the crisis as an act of US aggression rather than a governance failure, calling the blockade "a weapon of war" and rejecting Washington's offer of $100 million in aid distributed via the Catholic Church rather than the government, while simultaneously confirming that direct talks with the Trump administration, including a visit from CIA Director John Ratcliffe, have taken place.
Trump, for his part, has said openly that regime change in Cuba is "a question of time," and floated the idea of the US eventually "taking Cuba" outright — rhetoric that has alarmed Havana's remaining allies and complicated any near-term negotiated settlement. Mexico and Brazil have sent humanitarian aid while explicitly declining to take sides in the broader confrontation.