Since his attacks on Venezuela at the start of the year and the subsequent kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, Trump has deepened the United States’ control of Venezuela’s oil industry. To advance his interests in Latin America, he has cut off Cuba’s access to Venezuelan oil, declaring the country an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”
For decades, Venezuela had been Cuba’s primary supplier for oil, shipping roughly 30,000 barrels a day. The relationship between the countries dated back to agreements struck under Hugo Chávez and had served as an economic lifeline for Cuba ever since. The country received up to almost 100,000 barrels a day at its peak, meeting all of the country’s energy needs. All of that has trickled to a complete halt since January, however, and analysts estimate that Cuba could effectively run out of fuel by the end of March.
To make matters worse and squeeze the country further, Trump also passed an executive order at the end of January declaring that he would impose tariffs on goods coming from any country that supplied oil to Cuba, effectively cutting it off from its primary energy source. The majority of Cuba’s energy infrastructure is dependent on imported oil. The island has virtually no natural gas, limited renewable capacity, and produces only a fraction of the crude it needs domestically. About 75 percent of its oil had come from Venezuela and Mexico and both of those supply lines are now severed due to Trump’s blockade and threats of tariffs.
The results of this embargo have been devastating.
Rolling blackouts stretch up to 20 hours a day in some areas. Trash is piling up in the streets as collection trucks have run dry, creating a public health crisis. The country cannot harvest or transport agricultural produce. The lack of fuel is also affecting the country’s water supply as the water pumps require electricity. Airports are struggling to keep planes in the air, severely affecting the country’s tourism industry as multiple airlines, including Air Canada, WestJet and others, have suspended flights to Cuba entirely due to jet fuel shortages. Hospitals are rationing power. Earlier this month, the United Nations warned that Cuba faces a potential humanitarian “collapse” if its oil needs go unmet.
Cuba’s economy has long been under strain. Decades of accumulating sanctions and blockades imposed by U.S. imperialism to punish the country combined with the decadence of a bureaucratic regime that has prioritized its own preservation over the needs of working people of the country made the situation dire. Now, amid increasing inflation and this new phase of attacks by the Trump administration, Cuba is being pushed toward the edge.
From Sixty Years of Strangulation to the “Donroe Doctrine”
What is happening to Cuba today is only the latest chapter in a campaign of imperialist attacks waged for over six decades. What began as a measure during the Cold War to punish the Cuban Revolution and to stop its expansion to other Latin American countries has not ended.
The United States first imposed a trade embargo on Cuba in 1962, a year after the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. The embargo was then codified and tightened in 1996, which made it law to penalize foreign companies doing business with Cuba. This came amid the the Special Period of the 1990s where Cuba lost its main economic partner after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the island descended into a real crisis, with food shortages and blackouts pushing the country toward economic collapse.
Successive U.S. administrations have repeatedly tightened the screws, restricting banking transactions, blocking access to medicines and medical equipment, penalizing shipping companies that dock in Cuban ports, and pressuring allies to cut economic ties. The effect has been a systematic effort to strangle Cuba’s economy, squeezing its working class, and instrumentalizing the civic unrest that Washington has always hoped would deliver regime change.
Trump’s first term marked a sharp reversal of the brief Obama-era attempts to thaw and normalize these relations, as he reimposed sanctions, banned cruise ships, restricted remittances, and designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism. In his second term, by cutting off access to Venezuelan oil and threatening Mexico into submission, Trump is betting he can accomplish what the United States has been attempting since 1962: collapsing Cuba’s economy entirely.
The attacks on Venezuela and Cuba are not isolated events. They are part of Trump’s strategy of reasserting U.S. dominance across the Western Hemisphere and tightening its imperialist grip on Latin America.
Trump himself coined the term “the Donroe Doctrine” — a portmanteau of his own name and the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which declared the Americas off-limits to European interference and served as the ideological basis for U.S. intervention across the hemisphere for two centuries, not only to fight back against European imperialism, but also crush the region’s working class through the Cold War and plunder its resources.
The Trump administration’s December 2025 National Security Strategy laid his plans out explicitly: the United States would “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere,” seeking a region “free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets” with continued U.S. access to “key strategic locations.” It shouldn’t be lost that Trump’s shift is happening amid the historic crisis of U.S. imperialism, and the emergence of new confrontations on the world capitalist stage between emerging and great powers, especially China. To rival China’s growing influence in the region, Trump is relying on what he calls “peace through strength,” or the use of the United States’ might to guarantee outcomes favorable to its imperialist interests. It is a more classical imperialism — coercive, transactional, and unabashed — in the face of the decline of the liberal world order.
Across Latin America, Trump has moved on multiple fronts. He leveraged tariff threats against Mexico to extract concessions on migration and trade, bending Sheinbaum’s government to Washington’s will without firing a shot. He threw a financial lifeline to Javier Milei’s far-right government in Argentina, helping stabilize a regime that has become the Trump administration’s most enthusiastic regional ally. He also withheld aid to Honduras to ensure the Far Right’s victory in recent elections.
But nowhere has this policy been more nakedly revealed than in Venezuela and Cuba. In Venezuela, the capture of Maduro was just the opening move. What followed was not simply regime change; Trump was able to maintain the existing Chavista regime, reshaping it into one subordinated to his demands, with the United States now effectively exercising control not only over Venezuela’s oil, but also its political regime as a whole.
Cuba represents the next stage of this campaign. In the face of the embargo, the Trump administration signaled on Thursday that it will allow the sale of oil to Cuba’s private sector amid the growing crisis. But it is not the relief for the Cuban people that the administration paints it to be. Rather, it is a calculated attack on the nationalization of Cuba’s industries. By allowing private oil sales while maintaining the embargo on state transactions, Washington is attempting to use the growing energy crisis to pry open Cuba’s economy, accelerate the restoration of capitalism, and ultimately reverse what six decades of blockade has been trying to: the Cuban Revolution itself.
Cuba Needs More Than Symbolic Solidarity
Across Latin America and Europe, in the face of a rapidly deteriorating situation, leaders have been quick to express their solidarity with Cuba. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez condemned the blockade. Chile’s President Gabriel Boric called the blockade “criminal.” Brazil’s Lula denounced the embargo as a “massacre” of the Cuban people. Along will Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, they all promise solidarity and aid to Cuba. But this solidarity and aid are not oil, and it is oil that Cuba needs.
Among these, Mexico’s response is perhaps the most telling. For decades, regardless of its own tensions with U.S. imperialism, Mexico’s state-run oil company, Pemex, has shipped oil to Cuba, averaging nearly 20,000 barrels per day through most of 2025. After Venezuelan oil stopped flowing following Maduro’s capture, Mexican oil became Cuba’s only meaningful lifeline. Yet, as Trump’s tariff threats intensified, Sheinbaum quietly halted its oil shipments to Cuba in late January. Sheinbaum called it “a sovereign decision,” insisting it was not made under U.S. pressure, while simultaneously acknowledging that the tariff threat was real and that Mexico was evaluating its exposure.
After the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs, Sheinbaum was asked if this would mean a resumption of oil deliveries to Cuba, which she answered saying that she would “look into it,” but has done nothing to actually send it. Instead, Mexico sent ships loaded with food, framing it as “humanitarian aid” in the tradition of Mexican solidarity, while doing nothing to deliver the one thing that Cuba actually needs — oil — or challenge the U.S.’s embargo.
In Brazil, the gap between rhetoric and action is equally stark. Lula has spoken in passionate terms about Cuba, denouncing the blockade, invoking solidarity, calling for “finding a way to help.” Yet, his government has issued no official policy, and Petrobras, the state oil giant, has not sent a drop of oil to the island.
But there’s increasing pressure coming from below. In Mexico, solidarity with the Cuban people runs deep and is moving people to action, putting a glaring spotlight every day on Sheinbaum’s decision to not send oil and challenge the embargo. In Brazil, oil workers have taken the lead. In February, the Unified Federation of Petroleum Workers (FUP) formally requested an emergency meeting with Petrobras to arrange urgent fuel deliveries. Along with the National Federation of Oil Workers (FNP) and other unions and organizations, their campaign, “Petróleo para Cuba” (Oil for Cuba) makes a ringing argument: Cuba’s total annual oil needs equal roughly only six days of Petrobras’ production volume.
This outrage from below has fueled the campaign for the Nuestra América Flotilla, an important initiative from Progressive International that includes groups like CODEPINK and The People’s Forum and enjoys the support of political parties like Sheinbaum’s MORENA, and is set to converge in Havana on March 21. In the image of the actions of the Global Sumud Flotilla that sailed last year to challenge Israel’s blockade and bring humanitarian aid to Gaza amid the genocide, the Nuestra América Flotilla is aiming to bring essential humanitarian aid to the people of Cuba and take on Trump’s stranglehold.
Some contingents within this campaign, like the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) have gone further, putting forward a campaign around bringing solar panels and renewable energy. Their slogan, “Trump can’t blockade the sun,” is evocative: if U.S. imperialism is cutting off Cuba’s fossil fuel supply, perhaps the way is to leapfrog to a renewable energy model, bypassing the blockade entirely.
Nowhere in the manifesto of the Nuestra América Flotilla, however, is there any mention of oil.
It is an adaptation that fundamentally concedes to Trump on the oil question. Solar energy for hospitals, while a possible solution, is not oil, nor does it meet energy needs of the island in a way that can stop this free fall. It will only go towards managing the most acute expressions of this crisis. For all the essential medicine and foodstuffs that the mission will carry, there is no easy or real way of transporting and distributing it. The campaign accepts the maintenance of the embargo and pivots to workarounds, which is precisely what Trump’s strategy counts on. His leverage depends on the rest of the world either complying outright or, failing that, finding ways to manage Cuba’s suffering without directly challenging the mechanism producing it.
The mission to bring aid to Cuba and the attempts to stand up to Trump’s blockade represent real and courageous solidarity. But to address Cuba’s actual needs and challenge Trump’s blockade, we have to fight to send oil.
Workers In the United States Have to Send Oil
From the belly of the imperialist beast, it is essential that we fight these attempts to starve out our class siblings abroad. This fight is not abstract. Trump’s assault on Cuba is part of the same political project as his assaults on immigrants, on unions, on the rights of workers here at home. The hand that starves Cuba is the same hand that is sending ICE agents into communities, that attacks our democratic rights, and that concentrates wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.
Working people in the United States are already angry. Minneapolis showed the way, with tens of thousands mobilizing against ICE raids to protect their immigrant friends, neighbors and coworkers from Trump’s deportation machine. Against the tendencies to divide the struggles of our class siblings here from those abroad, it is essential that we unite these struggles. Indeed, the same imperialist project that is responsible for the suffering in Havana as responsible for the precariousness and brutality working people face in the United States. Any success that Trump has in disciplining the working class abroad only strengthens his hand in doing so here at home.
Our unions must take up the fight to challenge Trump’s embargo and mobilize their forces to send oil to Cuba. The working class has strategic leverage at precisely the points where the blockade operates. Oil workers and dockworkers — members of unions like the United Steelworkers, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) — work at the refineries, pipelines, docks and terminals that produce and move the fuel Cuba needs. Their labor makes the oil flow. They could not only stop the flow of that oil, but also leverage their power to redirect it.
In fact, the ILWU’s history of international solidarity is one of the great traditions of the American labor movement. In the 1930s, ILWU members blocked the shipment of supplies to rising fascist movements in Europe and Asia. In the 1960s, the union was the first in the United States to publicly oppose the Vietnam War. In the decades following during the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, ILWU Local 10 in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area repeatedly refused to handle South African cargo in solidarity. In 1974, the union joined an international boycott of Chilean cargo after the CIA-backed coup that murdered Salvador Allende.
The ILWU has a documented history in Cuba, too. In the 1940s, ILWU representatives went to Cuba to coordinate with Cuban sugar workers, helping establish the International Sugar Workers Committee. They have long opposed all trade sanctions against Cuba recognizing that, ultimately, all those punitive measures only hurt workers and their families.
Now too, as working people in Cuba face increasingly dire conditions, not just the ILWU, but the entire labor movement needs to spur to action, and we have to fight to make it real. In Brazil, oil workers are already showing the way with their “Petróleo para Cuba” campaign. In the United States, workers can do the same and more. Unions need to mobilize to action, not only passing resolutions to demand an end to the blockade, but also organize across shop floors to mobilize rank-and-file workers to actually fight for it.
Confronting U.S. imperialism directly is precisely what the moment demands because the precedent being set right now is enormous. If Trump successfully starves Cuba into submission, it only gives more wind in the sails of his “Donroe Doctrine” and strengthens his regime to continue with its offensive all across the continent. That strength, furthermore, only builds his forces to discipline the working class here at home. Breaking this blockade is not just an act of solidarity with the Cuban people; it is a defense of every working-class movement in the hemisphere that Washington has in its crosshairs.
Cuba is not alone. The Cuban people have shown extraordinary resilience in the face of six decades of siege. They deserve solidarity that is equal to the challenge: of a united, international working class, acting together in the knowledge that an injury to one is an injury to all. Our unions must rise to that occasion. The time is now.