Time travel doesn’t exist as far as we know, but take a visit to Cuba and you’ll certainly feel like you’re stepping into history. The U.S. has maintained an economic embargo on the island just 90 miles off its coastline for 64 years, hoping to force Havana’s communist leaders to capitulate. For 64 years, it hasn’t worked.
Cuba’s rulers haven’t budged, but life for ordinary Cubans has become increasingly difficult as the world around them slowly crumbles. Then in January, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were plucked from their compound in the dead of night and whisked away in a brazen, likely illegal—and highly successful—U. Decades of antagonism between Washington and Caracas evaporated in a matter of weeks, and before long Maduro’s deputy had granted Washington sweeping control over some of Venezuela's richest oil fields.
For weeks after Maduro’s capture, the rhetoric pouring out of the White House suggested Cuba was but the next domino to fall in Donald Trump’s Donroe Doctrine master plan. But in late February, American forces went to war in a different part of the world, and Havana all but disappeared from Trump’s agenda. Now, the U.S. president says he’ll take care of Cuba on the way back from Iran, as if the United States can simply stop by and collect another victory.
Reality begs to differ: nearly 10 months after Maduro’s capture, Cuba’s government remains firmly in power, its diplomats are squaring up to American representatives at the United Nations, and Washington appears no closer to achieving its original ambitions. Cuba may have slipped down Trump’s list of talking points, but the White House’s pressure campaign against Havana has quietly churned along in the background. Since January, Washington has systematically tightened economic restrictions on the island.
First came the cutoff of Venezuelan oil supplies and threats of tariffs against other countries providing fuel. Then came an expanding campaign of sanctions against Cuban officials, state enterprises and foreign companies doing business with Havana. The consequences have been devastating.
Cuba’s national electricity grid suffered at least six partial or complete collapses between January and September, with rolling blackouts sometimes lasting more than 24 hours. Politically, however, Washington has little to show for it. "I do think the war in Iran fundamentally altered the calculation around Cuba, because military assets which had been deployed in the Caribbean to address Maduro were needed elsewhere, and because the highly unpopular nature of the Iran war would make military action in Cuba more politically risky if it were not an immediate success like in Venezuela," Christopher Hernandez-Roy, acting director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Newsweek.
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