While Donald Trump talks about “friendly takeovers” from the White House podium, millions of Cubans are cooking with firewood and living through 18-hour blackouts. The gap between the policy talk and the human cost has never been wider.
What’s Happening Right Now
On March 4, Cuba’s Antonio Guiteras Power Plant, the island’s largest, shut down and plunged western Cuba into darkness. As of Thursday, millions remained without electricity, with officials warning full restoration could take three to four days, according to the Associated Press.
This is not a random infrastructure failure. It is the predictable result of a deliberate U.S. fuel blockade that The New York Times has called America’s first effective blockade of Cuba since the 1962 Missile Crisis.
Here is how we got here. After U.S. forces ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, the Trump administration cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, which had supplied roughly 35,000 barrels per day. Then, on January 29, Trump signed Executive Order 14380 threatening tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba. Mexico folded. Russia and China talked tough but did nothing. Cuba was effectively cut off.
The Human Cost Nobody’s Talking About
The United Nations Human Rights Office reports that Cuba’s food supply is threatened, water systems are failing, and hospitals are struggling to operate. Schools and universities have closed. Garbage is piling up in Havana because there is no diesel for trash trucks. The UN World Food Programme cannot even get relief supplies through efficiently.
A Politico report from January revealed the quiet part out loud: one administration source called the oil blockade “the chokehold to kill the regime” and said deposing Cuba’s communist government is “100 percent a 2026 event.”
That framing matters. When you call starving a nation a “chokehold,” you are telling on yourself about who you think is disposable.
The Diaspora Is Not Monolithic
In Miami’s Little Havana, the reaction is split. Outside Versailles Restaurant, some Cuban Americans celebrated when Trump announced the oil cutoff in January. “It’s going down for the count,” one resident told Local 10 News. GOP Rep. María Elvira Salazar declared that “tyrants are falling” and Cuba’s regime should be next, per Politico.
But not everyone is cheering. “I believe it when I see it,” one Cuban exile told Local 10 in February, pointing to decades of broken promises about Cuban liberation. Another was blunt: “They have to go alone.” The idea that U.S. intervention automatically equals freedom has a complicated track record, and plenty of people in the diaspora know it.
Why This Matters to the Culture
Cuba’s story is deeply tied to Black and Brown communities across the Americas. Afro-Cubans make up a significant portion of the island’s population and are disproportionately affected by economic crises. The island’s hip-hop scene, which emerged in the 1990s as a voice for Afro-Cuban identity and social criticism, has long connected with artists and activists in the United States.
More broadly, the pattern here should concern anyone paying attention. The administration moved on Venezuela. Now it is squeezing Cuba. The “Donroe Doctrine” is not just rhetoric. It is a playbook, and the people absorbing the consequences are overwhelmingly working-class, Black, and Brown.
When Marco Rubio negotiates with Raúl Castro’s grandson instead of actual government leaders, and the administration floats the idea of Cuba becoming a U.S. territory, the question is not whether regime change happens. The question is: who does it actually serve?
The Takeaway
Policy decisions have human weight. Twelve million people on an island 90 miles from Florida are living through a manufactured crisis. Whatever your position on Cuba’s government, the suffering is not theoretical. It is a 65-year-old man named Miguel Leyva worrying about his sick mother’s food spoiling during a blackout that has lasted more than 24 hours.
Pay attention. This is not just foreign policy. This is a test of what we accept being done in our name.
