Hours after the US military detained and extracted Nicolas Maduro out of Caracas, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said his people should be prepared to “give their blood, even their lives” to defend Venezuela and the Cuban revolution. Even that might not be enough.
With Maduro awaiting trial in New York, Cuba is left without its principal global ally as its economy careens deeper into the abyss.
For decades, Venezuela provided the communist-run island with the bulk of its fuel and financing in exchange for Cuban doctors, teachers and security personnel. Without those programs, the island’s already devastating energy woes would worsen and its shortages of food, medicine and basic goods would become even more pronounced.
“They’ve been left without a godfather, a benefactor that has been paying their bills, and they’re totally bankrupt,” said Emilio Morales, president of the Miami-based Havana Consulting Group. “How are they going to survive?”
During a meeting of Cuba’s legislature last month, officials painted a grim economic picture as they placed blame for the crisis on long-running US sanctions. Declining shipments of Venezuelan crude are a factor.
Cuba needs approximately 100,000 barrels of oil per day to function but produces just two-fifths of that, according to Jorge Pinon, a researcher at the University of Texas Energy Institute who tracks fuel shipments to the island. A decade ago, Venezuela provided enough to fully meet Cuban demand. By Pinon’s accounting, Caracas was sending just 35,000 barrels a day before US President Donald Trump ordered the seizure of oil tankers beginning last month.
The lack of fuel is leading to massive, economy-crushing blackouts in Cuba. Agricultural production and tourism to the island are at their lowest levels in decades. More than 2 million people — about a fifth of the island’s inhabitants — do not have reliable drinking water.
As a result of the crisis, Cuba’s population has collapsed 15 percent over the past decade. The government expects to lose another 20 percent of its people by 2050. The signs of strain are everywhere, from garbage going uncollected to empty shelves and soaring rates of mosquito-borne disease in a nation that used to hold up its health sector as a global model.
On Saturday, Trump suggested the regime in Havana was so weak that military force would not be needed to usher in change. “Cuba is going to fall of its own volition,” Trump told the New York Post.
He told the outlet that “many Cubans lost their lives” during the raid in Venezuela. In a statement on Sunday night, Diaz-Canel confirmed that 32 Cuban soldiers and interior ministry agents were killed.
Led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio — born in Florida to Cuban parents — Washington has been ratcheting up pressure on Havana. Speaking alongside Trump on Saturday, Rubio said Cuba’s leaders should be “concerned” by Maduro’s removal.
“The Cuban government is a huge problem,” Rubio said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. Although he declined to indicate whether the US would target Havana next, he said: “I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro.”
Key to Washington’s strategy would be keeping other nations from filling the Venezuelan funding gap. While Mexico, Russia and Iran have provided Cuba with fuel at times, it has not been enough to keep the economy running.
Mexican shipments dwindled to about 7,000 barrels a day last year, Pinon said, down from as much as 22,000 barrels in 2024. In addition to having to negotiate security and trade issues with Trump, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is facing domestic pressure to be more transparent about her government’s energy shipments to Cuba.
Diaz-Canel has “no allies in the hemisphere that will risk what are already fragile ties with Washington over Cuba,” said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, speaking about Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. “And it’s hard to imagine Russia, China or anyone else will come to the rescue.”
Even if Cuba can find a fuel supplier, it is unlikely to receive the same sweetheart deals that Caracas provided. Any new savior would have to take on Cuba as a credit risk and Washington as a political foe. “It appears Cuba has no options,” Herrero said. “Their economy will be pulverized.”
To be sure, the Cuban regime has shown remarkable tenacity in the past, prompting analysts to caution against seeing Venezuela as a make-or-break ally. “In theory there are other solutions that Cuba could pursue with other partners around the world that would compensate for Venezuela to some degree,” said Andres Pertierra, a Cuban-American historian who lived on the island for much of 2024 and is completing a dissertation on regime durability.
Pinon said there is not another nation willing to barter with the Cubans for fuel. So he wonders if the US, despite Rubio’s bellicosity, would allow Venezuela to keep supplying oil in the short term. “Nobody wants a failed Cuban state,” he said.
It is unknown how a post-Maduro government in Caracas would treat Cuba. Trump has said Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez is in charge, and although she is a staunch ally of the ousted socialist leader, she is not viewed as being as sympathetic to the regime in Havana as her predecessor.
Should ties be completely severed, it is hard to quantify the damage that would be done to Cuba’s leadership, Morales said. “It’s not just the lack of fuel, but the lack of money, their loss of influence, their loss of control over third parties,” the Havana Consulting Group president said. “They’ve never suffered a blow like this. It’s devastating.”
Though Cuba has long defied the odds — surviving multiple US attempts to kill or oust its leadership since the 1959 revolution, plus weathering a decade of pain after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1980s — the path ahead is becoming increasingly narrow.
The island “is in its darkest period in the last 65 years,” Herrero said. “There’s no telling how it will come out on the other end.”
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