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 warned in previous posts, it was only a matter of time before Mexico fell into the US’ crosshairs over 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 insists 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.
Last Thursday, the US announced a raft of new measures intended to starve Cuba 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. And the US has huge amounts 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 Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the UK Labour Party warns in the tweet below, the goal is “to starve Cuba into submission… This is economic warfare, plain and simple.”
Or as US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls 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 three weeks later. The attack on the rial 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.
“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, in “The Extortionate Human Cost of US-Led Sanctions…”:
[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!
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.
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, just as Kissinger was to Nixon, makes Cuba an even bigger target for US regime change efforts.
Rubio’s parents may have fled Cuba in 1956, three years before the Cuban revolution, when the country was in the brutal grasp 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 wrath. For two obvious reasons: money and power.
As the Cuban writer Abel Prieto once wrote, “In Miami, hatred of the Revolution is a business. And Rubio is his 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 in great detail 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 distraction from the Epstein scandal. But what chances does his administration have of toppling the Cuba’s communist regime, given it has not even replaced the Chavista government in Venezuela?
It’s hard to tell. On the one hand, Cuba’s economy is in even more dire 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, 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 energy — and the only realistic way of preventing that is if Russia and/or China begin(s) 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…
Nick Corbishley 