President Trump's latest executive order targeting oil shipments to Cuba has accelerated a humanitarian emergency across the island, where 11 million people now endure daily blackouts lasting up to twelve hours and food prices that have outpaced incomes by orders of magnitude. The directive threatens punitive tariffs on any nation supplying petroleum to Cuba, effectively weaponizing the island's energy dependence after Venezuela, once Havana's primary supplier, collapsed into its own crisis.
This escalation transforms an already severe economic situation into a test of collective endurance. The policy's logic—that sufficient economic pain will force regime change—rests on an assumption that decades of evidence have repeatedly challenged. What emerges instead is a deepening divide between the geopolitical objectives articulated in Washington and the immediate reality confronting a street vendor in Havana who can no longer afford to eat what she sells.
The arithmetic of survival
The material impact of the oil supply disruption is measurable in the granular details of daily life. Blackouts have extended from sporadic inconvenience to systematic deprivation, with power cuts now reaching eight to twelve hours daily in Havana and longer in provincial areas. Fuel stations ration gasoline through days-long queues, when supply arrives at all. Public transportation has contracted sharply, leaving workers unable to reach jobs and families isolated from essential services.
Food prices reflect the compounding pressure. Basic staples have surged beyond the purchasing power of state salaries and pensions. A 71-year-old street vendor, interviewed by Reuters, described crying because she could no longer afford the peanuts she sells—a small but devastating illustration of how macro-level policy translates into micro-level desperation. Taxi drivers report being unable to work for lack of fuel, severing one of the few remaining informal income streams. The state ration system, already strained, provides roughly a week's worth of subsidized basics per month, leaving families to navigate predatory black market prices for the rest.
This is not Cuba's first economic crisis. The "Special Period" of the 1990s, following the Soviet Union's collapse, remains the reference point for catastrophic scarcity. Multiple residents now describe current conditions as worse, a significant benchmark given that era's near-famine conditions and widespread malnutrition.
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Survival without horizon
The intended outcome of maximum pressure policies is government collapse or capitulation. The actual outcome, based on decades of similar approaches, is more complex. Economic warfare of this intensity does not typically produce the clean political transitions its architects envision. Instead, it tends to entrench existing power structures while devastating the populations those structures govern.
The Cuban government shows no indication of imminent collapse. What does appear to be collapsing is the social infrastructure that sustains ordinary life—the ability to work, to eat adequately, to maintain basic health, to move through physical space. The people enduring this are not the architects of policy in Havana or Washington. They are the taxi driver without fuel, the grandmother without electricity to refrigerate medicine, the worker who cannot reach their job. They have survived variations of this pressure for over sixty years, but survival is not thriving, and endurance has limits that are not infinite.
The question is not whether Cubans will endure—history suggests they will find ways to persist. The question is what that persistence costs, and whether the policy producing these costs can credibly claim to serve humanitarian ends when its primary observable effect is to make 11 million people poorer, hungrier, and more isolated.
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