Trump Is Plunging Cuba Into a Humanitarian Crisis
From 30-hour blackouts to extreme fuel shortages, the situation in Cuba under the second Trump administration is a catastrophe. Still, Cubans are showing extraordinary creativity and resilience in the face of the suffocating blockade.
Cubans use solar panels, electric vehicles, and portable battery systems as alternative energy sources amid ongoing fuel shortages and blackouts. Russian oil supplies have run out and fuel reserves are nearly depleted, worsening electricity shortages across the country. (Magdalena Chodownik / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Havana is running on fumes. For the first time since the Special Period, Cuba faces a crisis of near-existential proportions — and the threat of US military intervention is now being spoken aloud.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Cuba last week only cranked up the pressure. Behind closed doors, Washington appears to be preparing an indictment of Raúl Castro over the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft operated by Hermanos al Rescate, a Miami-based exile group with a long history of violating Cuban airspace — an episode depicted in Netflix’s Wasp Network. Three decades on, as Cuba gasps for air, the timing speaks for itself.
Ask Ambassador Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios, Cuba’s representative to Belgium and the European Union, about that potential indictment, and he’ll steer the conversation back to 1976. That year, a Miami-connected operation bombed Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 in midair, killing all seventy-three people aboard — among them the entire Cuban national fencing team. For Cuba, that atrocity is the real backdrop to Washington’s current theatrics.
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