Preface
This publication has spent most of this year on the war in Iran and the devastation in Gaza, and rightly so. But that focus has a cost: stories that deserve sustained attention can slip past unaddressed for months at a time. Cuba is one of them. What follows is an attempt to close that gap, not with a single news item, but with the fuller picture that eight months of neglect requires.
I. THE NIGHT IN CARACAS
At 2:01 a.m. on January 3, 2026, roughly 150 American aircraft, launched from 20 airbases across the Western Hemisphere, converged on Caracas. Over the next two and a half hours, US forces struck Fort Tiuna, Venezuela’s largest military complex, and a fortified presidential compound in the heart of the capital. By 4:29 a.m., President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, had been captured by American special operations forces and flown by helicopter to a US warship, then on to New York. A sealed indictment in the Southern District of New York awaited them there, charging both with narco-terrorism, cocaine importation conspiracy, and weapons violations.
President Trump announced the operation on Truth Social before dawn and held a press conference from Mar-a-Lago hours later, calling it one of the most powerful displays of American military competence in the country’s history. He said the US would “run” Venezuela until a safe and orderly transition of power could take place, and declined to rule out a longer military presence. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro and Flores would face “the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.” Trump did not notify Congress before the strike. Venezuela’s Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, was sworn in as acting president in the operation’s aftermath.
The forces involved were extensive: the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Delta Force, Navy and Marine Corps units, Coast Guard assets, Air Force support, US Cyber Command, US Space Command, the CIA, the DEA, and the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Venezuela’s Defense Minister, Vladimir Padrino López, later revised his country’s own death toll upward to 83, including 47 Venezuelan troops, nine of them women. Two civilians were killed and seven American soldiers were wounded, according to US figures.
Thirty-two Cuban military and police personnel were also killed in the operation, according to Cuba’s government, a figure Padrino López independently confirmed in a ceremony honoring Venezuela’s own dead. Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper, Granma, published the names, ranks, and ages of the dead, ranging from 26 to 60. They belonged to the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior, Cuba’s two main security agencies, and had been carrying out a mission at the request of Venezuela’s government. Some had been assigned to Maduro’s own personal protection detail. Their remains were repatriated to Havana on January 15 and received at the airport by President Díaz-Canel alongside 94-year-old former leader Raúl Castro, both in full military uniform. Cuba declared two days of national mourning. Trump, asked about the deaths aboard Air Force One days after the operation, acknowledged that a significant number of Cubans had died, without offering a specific figure of his own.
Chatham House’s Global Governance and Security Centre wrote that the capture of a sitting head of state, and his forcible transfer to the United States for trial, “poses a significant challenge for international law,” noting that despite US officials describing it as a law-enforcement “extraction mission,” it involved airstrikes on military targets and was, in scale and character, a military operation. NPR’s own analysis noted the scale mismatch with Washington’s most direct historical precedent, the 1989 capture of Panama’s Manuel Noriega: Panama had a population of roughly 2.5 million, deep US ties, and existing American military bases on its soil. Venezuela, with 28 million people and comparatively few institutional ties to the US, was a different undertaking entirely. Trump himself invoked the Noriega precedent, and the operation fell, by coincidence or design, exactly 36 years to the day after US forces entered Panama.
The immediate practical consequence for Cuba was severed oil. Venezuela had been Cuba’s most important fuel supplier for years, a relationship dating back to the preferential oil agreements Hugo Chávez extended to Fidel Castro’s government in the early 2000s. Within weeks of the Caracas operation, that supply line was gone.
II. THE BLOCKADE
Trump moved quickly to extend the pressure to Cuba. In January, he warned of tariffs against any country that sold or shipped oil to Havana. The effect was immediate and compounding: Cuba, whose domestic production covers only about 40 percent of its own fuel needs even in normal times, now faced a near-total cutoff of the imported fuel that made up the rest.
The blackouts followed within weeks. On March 16, Cuba’s Ministry of Energy and Mines reported a “complete disconnection” of the national electrical grid, plunging the country’s roughly 11 million residents into an island-wide outage, the first since the blockade began. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that week that Cuba had not received an oil shipment in more than three months, was running what power it could generate on solar, natural gas, and thermoelectric plants, and that hospitals had been forced to postpone surgeries for tens of thousands of patients. Cuba’s National Electric System recorded three total collapses that month alone, the longest lasting 29 hours and 29 minutes. More than 60 percent of the country experienced outages lasting over 24 hours. Over 1,700 international flights were canceled since February, nine airports reported fuel shortages, and by one Cuban economic analyst’s estimate, 96.4 percent of the country’s small and medium businesses were at risk of collapse.
Drivers described lines of 15 hours or longer to purchase 20 liters of gasoline, with informal-market prices climbing as high as $10 a liter. Piles of uncollected garbage accumulated in Havana because sanitation trucks had no fuel to run their routes. Many households turned to wood fires for cooking and heating water. Al Jazeera correspondent Ed Augustin, reporting from Havana, described the crisis as “absolutely eviscerating every part of life,” with blackouts in the capital running up to 15 hours a day and, in rural areas, sometimes stretching more than a full day without power.
Sporadic relief arrived, and just as quickly ran out. A Russian tanker, the Anatoly Kolodkin, docked at Matanzas on March 31 carrying 730,000 barrels of crude, enough, officials estimated, for seven to ten days of consumption. A second Russian tanker was announced but became stranded in the Atlantic for weeks after departing a Baltic port. By July, Cuba recorded its eighth blackout since late 2024 and its third major nationwide outage of 2026 alone, with power cuts stretching more than 30 hours in parts of Havana and beyond 70 hours in some rural provinces.
Díaz-Canel has repeatedly accused Washington of waging what he calls a “genocidal energy blockade” designed to force Cuba’s surrender through collective punishment. In a March social media post, he accused the US of intending to seize the country’s resources and economy outright. Small, scattered protests broke out in Havana neighborhoods in May, residents banging pots and pans and shouting “Turn on the lights!” Díaz-Canel confirmed in March that his government had entered direct talks with the Trump administration to resolve the standoff. Those talks, as of this week, have produced no agreement. The sanctions have instead continued to escalate: new US measures were announced in June, twice in July, and twice more in August, with the most recent, imposed Thursday, specifically targeting what the State Department called “Marxist Subversive Networks and Corrupt Economic Dealings” tied to Cuba’s government and military-run conglomerate, GAESA.
III. WHAT THE UN FOUND
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control clarified in an August FAQ that humanitarian activities and transactions with Cuba remain legally permitted despite the sanctions. In practice, that exemption has meant little. Francisco Pichón, the UN’s resident coordinator in Cuba, told AFP that shipping companies, insurers, and banks have adopted what he called “overcompliance,” simply declining to handle any Cuba-bound cargo at all rather than risk running afoul of US sanctions law, regardless of whether a given shipment legally qualifies for humanitarian exemption. More than 2,900 metric tons of humanitarian food cargo have been stranded by shipping-company suspensions as a result, and deliveries of cancer medication and water-treatment equipment have been delayed or rerouted.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, “Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines.” His office’s formal statement called for the sanctions to be lifted immediately, warning that energy, transport, irrigation, and basic services were failing simultaneously and that women, children, older Cubans, and rural farmers were being hit hardest. Independent UN human rights experts separately condemned the sanctions as a violation of international law and called on Washington to “cease all threats and hostile acts against Cuba’s sovereignty.”
Human Rights Watch has separately warned that the absence of reliable electricity is now affecting nearly every dimension of daily life on the island, not just discrete services. Cuba’s own economy has contracted by close to 15 percent this year, a figure the UN’s own resident coordinator has said cannot be attributed to sanctions alone. Pichón told Cuban outlet Belly of the Beast that the crisis reflects years of accumulated pressures, including hurricanes, droughts, and a deteriorating economy, compounded, not created outright, by the fuel blockade. This week, at Havana’s request, the UN General Assembly convened a special session specifically to debate the decades-long US embargo and its most recent escalation.
IV. WHO ANSWERED
China has been Cuba’s most consistent and substantial source of outside relief. President Xi Jinping authorized an initial $80 million emergency assistance package in January, alongside a rice shipment that began at 60,000 tons and grew to 90,000 tons over the year. In August, China’s ambassador in Havana, Hua Xin, announced an additional shipment of 5,000 solar panels, delivered within a day of the latest round of US sanctions being announced, aimed directly at Cuba’s energy shortfall. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian has called the US measures “inhumane actions that deprive the Cuban people of their right to subsistence and development,” and repeatedly urged Washington to end the blockade entirely. China’s ambassador to Havana has also offered rhetorical solidarity beyond material aid, expressing confidence in Cuba’s ability to “achieve its development” despite the pressure campaign.
Mexico has taken a smaller but genuinely defiant position. President Claudia Sheinbaum dispatched two Mexican navy vessels carrying 814 tonnes of food to Cuba in February, and has publicly committed to continuing that support despite direct US tariff threats against any country that trades with or assists the island. Sheinbaum said Mexico could not ignore what the Cuban people were experiencing under US sanctions, adding that Mexico does not want sanctions imposed against itself but would not abandon Cuba over the threat.
Russia’s contribution has been real but limited and unreliable, a single tanker’s worth of relief followed by a second shipment that spent weeks stranded at sea. What China and Mexico have offered, by contrast, has been sustained: repeated shipments, renewed public commitments, and continued diplomatic cover at the UN and in bilateral statements, even as US pressure on both countries has grown over their support for Havana.
Washington has not stayed quiet in the face of that support. The entire sanctions campaign rests on a national emergency declaration, Executive Order 14380, signed January 29 and citing what it calls an “unusual and extraordinary threat” from Cuba’s government. In May, the administration specifically sanctioned Cuba’s Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Álvaro López Miera, and its Chief of the General Staff, Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, over their ties to Moscow and Beijing, along with a company, Duna S.A., accused of facilitating Chinese and Russian military equipment entering Cuba. Thursday’s sanctions landed the same day as the latest Chinese solar panel shipment. They targeted nine state-owned Cuban companies and the leadership of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio said was responsible for “a vast subversive network” operating inside the United States. The State Department has separately widened enforcement against American citizens who visit Cuba and do business with government-linked enterprises there. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the administration is actively seeking Cuban officials willing to negotiate a deal that would facilitate regime change by the end of the year.
Epilogue
Cuba’s crisis did not begin in a vacuum, and it will not resolve in one either. It began with a military raid three thousand miles away, in a country most Americans were not thinking about in January and have likely stopped thinking about since. It has been sustained, month after month, by a fuel blockade that the UN’s own human rights chief says is killing children through medical scarcity alone. It has been formally documented by the same international institutions the United States has spent the past two years working to sideline, in Iran, in Gaza, and inside the ICC's own courtroom. And it has been answered, unevenly but consistently, not by the country that once positioned itself as the hemisphere’s guarantor of humanitarian relief, but by the two governments Washington has spent this same year trying hardest to isolate.
Sources: House of Commons Library (UK, primary source — Venezuela operation briefing, casualty and outcome detail); Chatham House (UK, international law think tank — legal analysis of the Maduro capture); NPR (US — Panama precedent comparison, scale analysis); CNN (US — Trump statement, Bondi quote, UN Security Council request); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Padrino López’s revised 83-death toll, 47 Venezuelan troops including nine women, Maduro protection-detail detail); Fox News (US — Granma statement, names/ranks/ages release, two-day mourning); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — January 15 repatriation ceremony, Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro’s attendance); Yahoo News via AP/Reuters (US wire — Trump’s Air Force One acknowledgment, original Cuban government statement); NPR (US — March blackout detail, Díaz-Canel statement on oil shipments); CNN (US — HRW warning, service disruption detail); CNBC (US — Díaz-Canel’s confirmation of direct talks with the Trump administration, blockade timeline detail); Cuba Headlines (Cuba-focused outlet — March grid collapse statistics, flight cancellations, SME risk figure, Russian tanker detail); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Augustin’s on-the-ground quote, blackout duration detail); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Havana protest detail, Díaz-Canel “genocidal blockade” quote); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — July blackout figures, eighth-blackout count); NPR (US — Russian tanker stranding detail, Cuba’s 40-percent domestic fuel production figure); France 24 (France, public broadcaster — Pichón’s “overcompliance” quote and detail); Belly of the Beast (Cuba-focused independent outlet — Pichón’s fuller interview, economic contraction figure); OHCHR (UN, primary source — Türk’s “children are dying” statement); OHCHR (UN, primary source — independent experts’ condemnation, sanctions timeline since June); UN News (UN, primary source — UN General Assembly special session detail); Cuba Headlines (Cuba-focused outlet — China’s $80 million aid package, solar panel shipment, ambassador’s “achieve its development” quote); South China Morning Post (Hong Kong, editorially independent from mainland — China rice shipment detail, PDVSA shipping data); Progressive International (advocacy outlet, flag orientation — Lin Jian’s “inhumane actions” quote); News on Air India (India, state broadcaster — Sheinbaum quote, Mexican naval shipment detail); State Department (US, primary source — full sanctions timeline and fact sheets); The White House (US, primary source — Executive Order 14380 national emergency declaration); South China Morning Post (Hong Kong, editorially independent from mainland — López Miera and Legrá Sotolongo sanctions, Duna S.A. detail); The Washington Times (US — Rubio’s ICAP “subversive network” quote, American traveler enforcement detail); Fox News (US — Wall Street Journal’s regime-change reporting, Chinese Foreign Ministry statement)
