Cuba and the crass cynicism of the Trump administration

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Right now, about a third of Cuba is disconnected from the national power system, which suffered another partial collapse—the umpteenth—after a critical thermal power plant in the western province of Matanzas went offline this morning due to a breakdown. The context pointed toward this kind of event. Following the depletion of the Russian crude oil that arrived in March on the tanker Anatoly Kolodkin, whose use briefly but very noticeably alleviated the multifactorial energy crisis that has been going on for seven years —and which began during, and because of, the first Trump administration—, things have returned to the worst possible state.

My father-in-law, who lives in the province of Camagüey, had already been without electricity for 20 hours, and now he is included in the disconnection. A family friend here in Havana told me last Tuesday that in her neighborhood they had been without electricity for about 40 hours—and counting at the time we spoke. That's how things are going. Since last December, the second Trump administration has intensified the persecution and pressure on fuel shipments to Cuba, following the seizure of the tanker Skipper, which had left Venezuela, then governed by Nicolás Maduro. The violent capture of the latter made it clear that the de facto cutoff of Venezuelan fuel shipments —with which the Island, at least, was surviving— was here to stay. In parallel, Trump clipped the sovereignist wings of Claudia Sheinbaum and forced her to suspend —in the second half of January— shipments of Mexican crude.

Shamelessly, Marco Rubio insists that there is no oil blockade, but the White House itself has openly institutionalized—twice—that selling crude to Cuba or generally working with its energy sector will have consequences, directly generated from Washington. Trump's latest executive order against Cuba, complemented by specific designations from Foggy Bottom, intensifies the historic and comprehensive U.S. sanctions against Cuba to unprecedented levels, tying the Cuban government's hands and feet.

And yes, the Cuban government is also very responsible for the state of affairs, but, despite its gross management problems, without Trump's boot on top, today it could be better protecting its people, with more electricity, more food. Not at paradisiacal levels, not at all, but I am sure that the destitution we are living right now would not be so massive or so severe. That is why it seems excessively cynical to me that the State Department claims that Havana is preventing the realization of its supposed $100 million offer to "support" the Cuban people directly through non-governmental channels. I am in favor of that offer being realized if it is real, but it is still crass cynicism, and it is still plausible and understandable to resist its materialization.

And falling into the same bag are Rubio's statements blaming the Cuban authorities for all the responsibility regarding the crisis, especially when he deals with issues such as the tourism sector, which he himself, since his time as a senator, has worked to torpedo. Or the mining sector, following the very recent departure of the Canadian Sherritt, which for many years was extracting nickel-cobalt sinter—a combined ore that Cuba lacks the technology to refine into separate, more valuable metals—from the mines in the municipality of Moa in the east of the country, all as a consequence of the targeted tightening of U.S. sanctions. Shame on them.