Front Burner - Cuba is pushed to the brink

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Cuba has been facing rolling blackouts, food shortages, and rationed hospital resources after a month with no oil imports. The energy crisis has also been a major blow to the country’s tourism industry, as major airlines suspended service to the country.The cutoff came after the United States severed the island’s access to Venezuelan oil in January, and then warned any country supplying Cuba it could face retaliation. The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson has been reporting on the region for decades. He joins us to talk about how the Trump administration hopes this could end communist rule in the country.

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This is a CBC podcast. It's very sad because the only thing that is light up there is the coast with the resorts. But when you go inside, it's all dark. They don't have electricity. They don't have fuel. For the first time in a decade, Cuba has gone a month with no oil imports. The result has been rolling blackouts, food shortages, and rationed hospital resources. An already economically starved country pushed to the brink of a humanitarian crisis. crisis. The cutoff came after the United States, severed the island's access to Venezuelan

oil in January, and then warned any country supplying Cuba it could face retaliation. It also delivered a gigantic blow to the tourism industry as major airlines suspend service. Back with me today is a New Yorker's John Lee Anderson. John has reported on Cuba and the region for decades, and he just returned from Havana. I found the two previous conversations I have with John about Venezuela to be super helpful. We'll be talking about how the Trump administration hopes that this could end more than 70 years of communist rule in the country. Cuba looks like it's ready to fall. I don't know how they, if they can hold out. But Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela. John, hi, it's really good to have

you back. Great to be with you. Thanks. Can you walk us through how this oil blockade came together and why this moment marks such a sharp escalation from the economic crisis Cuba was already living through? I mean, first of all, as you'll recall, when the Trump administration went in in a military raid and abducted President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela on January 3rd, one of the first announcements that was made was that Cuba would no longer be getting any oil or cash. I think that was a tweet from Trump a day or two later. There will be no more oil or cash going to Cuba from Venezuela. Now, that was an important foundation stone for what's followed,

because Venezuela has been essentially the cash cow, if you will, for Cuba over the past 20 years. You'll recall that for 35 years, communist Cuba under Fidel Castro was supported by the Soviet Union And when it imploded at the beginning of the 1990s, there was actually a period called the special period by Fidel, which was a period of great panury on the island. Real hardship. Essentially, the economy just bottomed out. It was an absolute abrupt end to all subsidies. Because of the nature of the Cold War, Fidel had more or less existed upon the large assets of the Soviets and hadn't really built up an additional economy. it was very much a kind of Cold War dependent state.

And so for about four years, five years, the island was really in bad shape. I was living there at the time. You'd go to the store and people would complain because there was no merchandise. People were tired of so many years of prohibition without seeing any results. And that was when you had the 1994 Rafter's crisis that was preceded by an uprising in Havana, which had never been seen before. August 5th, 1994, went down in Cuban history as the Malekonassau. For the first time since the triumph of the revolution,

thousands of Cubans took to the streets in a spontaneous protest against the Castro regime. Things were really bad. There were long, rolling blackouts. There was almost no running water. People got skinny. And 50,000 people took to rafts and went to the United States. The lack of access to wood, and waterproof materials sparks a creativity among those seeking to flee. In subsequent arrangements between President, then President Clinton and Fidel Castro, they upped the quota of legal migrants from Cuba to the United States to sort of help them let off steam.

And around the end of the 90s, President Chavez took power in Venezuela and signed a sort of oil for expertise deal with Cuba, whereby Venezuela. Venezuela would give subsidized, essentially free oil to Cuba, which has never been able to meet its own needs. It produces up 30 to 40 percent of its own needs, if that. In return for teachers, doctors, and, you know, intelligence agents, which have essentially been, you know, helping first President Chavez, then his successor, Maduro over the past 20 odd years. under Maduro and Venezuela's own economic hardships over the past decade, a lot of those subsidies have been cut back, but they've still continued,

so that Cuba has not received what it needs every day in terms of oil shipments from oil-rich Venezuela, but it's kept it ticking over. That, in fact, has gradually been grinding down. So you have these blackouts, and there's been a few national blackouts. They don't have enough money. to maintain their substations and that kind of thing, but the precipitous end of all oil shipments from Venezuela spells real disaster for Cuba,

because not only were they using the oil, but they were also selling on the spot market some of that oil to get cash for their other needs, essentially taking from Peter to pay Paul, and it was sort of like someone living off of credit cards, you know. And now that's maxed out. So they don't have any credit cards left. Maduro's gone.

Trump is now essentially running Venezuela, as we've seen. And when I was on the island just last week, I was being told they had about two weeks in reserves. And what we were also seeing since then is that the Trump, Washington, has been stepping on other countries, such as Mexico, which was also sending them a little bit of oil to stop them from helping. The Trump administration has threatened. threaten tariffs on other countries that supply oil to Cuba. Mexico says its shipments are now halted.

President Scheinbaum said her government is talking to Washington to find ways of sending fuel to Cuba without being hit by tariffs. You can't strangle a people in this way. It's very unjust. And now is also pressuring countries that have received programs of Cuban doctors in return for cash to expel their doctors, and a few countries are beginning to follow suit. So essentially what's happening is they've cut them off from their energy supplies, their cash supply, and they're going after their last remaining sources of income, which have to do with Cuba's International Medical Corps,

which goes to foreign countries such as Guatemala, Brazil, and many others, in return for cash to the government. John, what happens when the reserves run out? Well, we're already seeing the effects. When I was in Havana, there were rolling blackouts of somewhere between 12 and 15, maybe 20 hours a day, depending on the part of the city you were in. Outside of Havana, it was supposed to be much worse than that, which is classic, of course. Now, I stayed in one of the very handful of small, private, essentially, boutique hotels. I'm talking about houses with six to eight rooms, and they have their own.

on generators. But so in the hotels I was stayed in, sometimes we'd be on the national grid, and I knew that when suddenly it would go black, and after a few minutes, the generator would start up. And we, in, you know, dollar-paying guests in a small private hotel, would have lights. But that's not the case for most of the island. The last night I was in Havana, I went around it. It was just complete blackness everywhere. And so that has a profound impact on, as you can imagine, on other services like schools, hospitals, of course, it's critical. Transportation for workers. So what happened, I think, last week, Monday or Tuesday, they imposed emergency regulations on a series of public sector enterprises like hospital, schools,

cutting back hours. They've ended public transportation altogether to some areas, outlying areas. I have a friend who lives in one. They're supposed to reimpose it, but he doesn't know when. Most people don't have cars. So that's an issue. It also means that the internet, such as it exists in Cuba, it's not like Canada or the United States, is also under a real challenge. You know, it's a real problem. It was already an issue when I was there.

You have a kind of informal dollarized economy. So certain service stations, gas stations, if you had dollars, you could get. gasoline. You could get up to 40 liters. And the queues, the lines of cars to get those were about two or three blocks long, say, seven to ten hours of queues. And the peso gas stations, essentially, the guy that was driving me around was number 8,000. If there was gas, it would have meant he would get his 40 years sometime in March, at the end of March. So it wasn't happening at all. Yesterday he sent me a message saying there wasn't any gasoline in any weather. I mean, there already wasn't in the peso sector and there's none in the dollar.

So everything's grinding to a halt. We're seeing that airlines have begun to suspend services and evacuate citizens, the Canadians we saw a couple of days ago, the Russians today. I mean, to the extent that it's affected tourism, tourism was already abysmally down. I've never seen it so scant. as it was a bit over a week ago when I left. So this just, you know, in a number of ways, the effect of the intervention in Venezuela,

the consequence to Cuba is essentially to begin a kind of asphyxiation. In a sense, it's as if you have a kind of semi-conscious patient and you've decided to just start squeezing their throat. You know, they were already in a kind of, Not quite a coma, but comatose, entering a comatose state, and now the hands on the throat. That's where we're at. And it seems like this will continue for some weeks with as yet unforeseeable consequences. Isn't for everyone.

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slash financing. BDC, financing, advising, no-how. Russia has suggested that oil will still reach the island, but so far that doesn't seem to have materialized at all, right? You know, we've seen the United States basically track this ship around the world, this Panamanian-flagued oil tanker around the world, and sees it. Here's a quote from the Pentagon, by land, air, or sea. Our armed forces will find you and deliver justice.

You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us. And just, what does that tell you about how difficult and risky it is for fuel to reach Cuba in the moment from any other source? It is very difficult. When I was in Havana, there was talk amongst the diplomatic community, concerned diplomatic community, that this not reach a kind of extreme or critical stage because with the possible volatile consequences that could have, people dying in hospitals, rioting, any number of law and order situations, that kind of thing. As I came back, I'm in Britain right now, I came back by Miami and Washington a couple days in each to try to find out what was happening. what the thinking was. And I'm not sure it's landed 100% in a certain policy arena. I think what we're seeing is a kind of square-jod or bare-knuckles kind of initial approach

that's intended to scare the Cubans into entering a dialogue with the United States and negotiations. But what I also was hearing from people, some of whom were rather close. to the Trump administration was that Marco Rubio, who is the architect of this Cuba policy, doesn't particularly want to see a crisis erupt. In other words, this triangulation that I described will carry on just to the point where the patient will revive and say, you know, give me some oxygen. The U.S. would then be in a position to say, okay, you want oxygen, will allow humanitarian shipments of oil.

Maybe from Mexico, that's something Claudia Shinebaum, the president, has kind of mooted. Although she's obeyed Trump's warnings not to continue supplying oil through the state oil company, she obeyed. A tanker was turned back while I was there to Mexico. That was a real sort of doomsday. It had a really stultifying effect in Havana.

People realized that it wasn't just Venezuela, it was Mexico too, which has been the longstanding sort of friend and ally to Cuba throughout all of the years of revolution, even if sometimes the help was symbolic, and which, in frankly, its oil shipments were. But now, even if they only represent, say, 15% of their needs, which is sort of what they were giving them, these would be vital. Now, it seems unclear. We're in, I think, a kind of limbo where we're having a bit of push-me-pull-you between Washington and Mexico City on that score. Claudia Scheinbaum has to decide how far she's willing to go. At the same time as you have a kind of unmoored defense department willing to sort of fire drones into Mexico to go after its cartels. Yeah. You know.

The Wall Street Journal reported in late January that the U.S. was looking for. Cuban government insiders who can help cut deals to push out the current leadership and just what kind of support is there for the current president from within the country right now? Is something like what we saw in Venezuela possible? I don't think it's quite the same scenario. Neither regime, neither government is or was monolithic, of course. As we've seen in Venezuela, there were factions. One faction, the faction that has remained, seems to be fairly schizophrenic in the sense that

was a revolutionary, represented a revolutionary regime on the left just a month ago, and are now turning themselves into trompistas, as they would say, in Latin America. There's a lot of waggish commentary about that at the moment. There's not the same in Cuba. Cuba is a revolution that's 67 years old. It is a very unpopular government at the moment to a lot of the citizenry who are fed up with the kind of daily sacrifice they have to undergo. The current president is uncharismatic, but not hated. He is simply seen as a kind of gray figure, certainly not a leader like the Castro brothers were. And perhaps not his own man either.

The military are seen as the real power brokers in the country and the economic arbiters in the country. There's an economic group called Gaethe, which is a kind of, octopi, you know, that's run by the military. They have their hands and everything from finance to fisheries to tourism, to hotels and construction and everything. That's where the real power, economic power, such as it remains, exists on the island. And that's in the hands of military men appointed by Raul Castro, who, although he stepped down, you know, seven years ago, is still alive. Now, Miguel D. Casnell, the president, 60-something, man who, who was handpicked by him has won one election.

He's allowed two terms. You know, he's in his last two years of office. Essentially, he has to step down, and there has to be elections in two years. That timeline to my eye would give the U.S. if it's pressuring Cuba to undergo some kind of, the beginning of some kind of political transformation or a transition. it gives them a timeline that's not unrealistic or perhaps not so extreme for the Cubans to begin to maybe figure out how they can open up and liberalize. But I think the jury's a bit out.

You know, that Wall Street Journal's story, I think, you know, it had an unnamed senior administration source. Very likely Marco Rubio or someone close to him, right? So as far as I've been able to tell, that was a bit of a stalking horse commentary. As far as I know, they don't really have that person. There were a couple of cabinet members mentioned in the diplomatic community as sort of, hmm, this person might appeal, you know, could be a liberal, a transitional figure. But other than the kind of rumors and leaks that there are. were some kind of dialogues going on in Mexico City, probably between the CIA and Raul Castro's son, Alejandro, which still had not been confirmed. There's no sense that there is any kind of true engagement taking place. The Cuban security state has hunkered down and said, we're ready to undergo sacrifice. We've done it before. We'll do it again. We resist these bullying calls via the imperial power. And the Americans are saying, you guys are on the ropes. You know,

come to daddy, time to deal. I know you mentioned before that you don't think Marco Rubio, you know, this is someone who is American-born, but the son of Cuban immigrants in his 2012 memoir, he wrote, I boasted, I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba. You mentioned before that he doesn't necessarily want to see this come to a crisis point. But like, what would that point be for him? Yeah, Jamie. I mean,

I tried to game this with a number of people myself. In Miami, in Havana and in Washington, and nobody seems to know. I mean, does he expect the Communist Party to simply say, okay, we give up, we'll go back to our houses? That's clearly not going to happen. It's an island. People live, in-houses that are identifiable to the people who resent or even hate them, the potential for a civil breakdown and violence to erupt in a place where the hegemonic power, the military or the Communist Party, is seen as suddenly weak or incapable of controlling things, could be extremely dangerous. So watching what they've done in Venezuela suggests that they're looking for a kind of Delcey figure. And so, yes, it is possible that there's someone in the kind of cabinet

who could be suggested as a replacement figure or a successor figure to D.S. Knoll, who would still be a party man, but the promise would be that, I suppose, that they would be the reformer. The problem here is that in any scenario like this, you can put the cart before the horse and things can get out of control. The first thing that needs to be done, and I would think that watching how Trump behaves and what he seems to be after, the economics of this would seem to be the important thing, both for the Cubans who need oxygen, so to speak, and Trump, who seems to put economy before democracy or human rights. So I would think if the Cubans began by saying,

we're ready to open up the economy, that a deal makes. process could ensue in which things like release of political prisoners, a change of the Constitution to allow, you know, could be put to the back burner, perhaps, you know, a change of the constitution, which would have to be done to allow for a multi-party democracy to take root in Cuba. And I would think that that would be something that would be back burner, not just for the Cuban Communist Party, but for the Trump regime as well. Because I think if, and by the way, I heard this even from people close to the Communist Party in Cuba, what does Trump want?

A Trump badadero beach resort? You know, and frankly, after everything we've seen over the past year, I don't think, you know, that is not as cartoonishly grotesque an assertion as one might imagine. I'm not saying I know that, but from Trump's perspective, okay, Cuba doesn't have oil, but it has 700 miles. It's a 700 mile long Caribbean island that is a real estate man's dream. And so I would guess that if they offer some economic blandishments

that that might begin the process going. So that's Trump. Rubio may want to see them truly disabled or humbled politically. But parsing his language, which has also been a little bit more moderate than I would have expected, that he is also aware of the dangers in pushing too fast, too far. This is, after and all, an island. They have a bunker mentality.

They've been in power for a very long time. And the risk to the Trump administration of a new rafters crisis and its social implosion on the island where the U.S. would be forced to intervene, evacuate people, send in the Coast Guard relief flights, have potentially tens of thousands of Cubans arriving on American shores at the same time as they're deporting them, would be awkward to say the least. John, just as a final question for you, if you are another country in Latin America watching when it's happening with Cuba right now, what lessons do you take about survival, about sovereignty, about how to maneuver? Well, it's a very good question. And of course, everybody's taking stock and making their own calculations. A number have already done so. Gustavo Petro of Columbia, you know, former guerrilla and leftist, who's known to be pretty volatile. We saw him recently go to the White House and, you know, get down with MAGA with Trump. He left the White House wearing a MAGA hat with a Sharpie signature autograph by Trump. I thought he was terrific.

You know, he's very good. You get a long great. Petro said the meeting diffused regional tensions. He gave me a red cap that said, make America great again. I wrote with a pen and put an S and said, make America's great. And that can only be done on the basis of mutual respect. President Molino of Panama has protested Trump's egregious assertions that we're going to take back the canal. and I have to say feebly protested because, in fact, he's given him everything he wants.

And so on, so on. Gladys Shrinbaum will be an interesting one to watch because, of course, she's the president of Mexico, which has huge trade relationship with the United States. It shares this common border. They have a unique and peculiarly closed relationship. And I think he knows he has to be careful with her, but she has also been, frankly, appeasing him, while appearing to be asserting the sovereign rights of Mexico, which is important to the Mexicans, it's very difficult for all of them.

The idea of national sovereignty has been thrown, frankly, into the rubbish bin with Trump's tactics over the past year, and especially since January 3rd. And I think that's something that everyone understands. So you have sort of three groups. You have the ones where it's not yet defined and they're hoping to keep low profile and keep their heads down, you know, the smaller states of the Caribbean and Central America. You have the enablers and appeasers, Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Ecuador. And then you have the countries trying to do rope adope like Thadde Scheinbaum and now the Venezuelans.

Brazil, Lula, big economy, big country is managing to stand firm. He's got a lot to deal with and Trump recognizes that. And finally, the last group, there is the kind of. of the Trumpite groups, you know, the Buckele of El Salvador, Mille of Argentina, and the incoming guy in Chile cast. So, yeah, it's an imperial domain. All right. That feels like a good place for us to leave it today.

John, this was excellent. Thank you so much for coming back on. Very welcome. All right. That is all for today. Front burner was produced this week by Joytha Shen Gupta, Shannon Higgins, Matthew Amha, Kevin Sexton, Cecilia Armstrong and Mackenzie Cameron.

Our intern is John Costello. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producers are Imogen Burchard and Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McKay Blokos. And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.