John Suarez, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, told TMD that in his recent conversations with politicians and policymakers, there’s an appetite for pressing the Cuban government. “They’re expecting that they can use that as some sort of leverage to pressure for reforms or changes,” he said, “but they haven’t been precise about what the asks are.”
Cuba has been ruled by a communist government since Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. And though the regime has survived the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the collapse of Soviet support, and decades of U.S. sanctions, its people have suffered almost 70 years of decline.
Even before U.S. intervention in Venezuela, “Cuba was already in crisis,” Ricardo Torres, an economist at American University who studies Cuba, told TMD. Apart from Haiti, Cuba is the only Latin American economy in recession. Mosquito-borne illnesses plague the country as a health system once the pride of many Cubans cannot cope with the nation’s needs due to a critical shortage of supplies. Human rights groups have recently documented that 89 percent of the country’s population lives in extreme poverty. Even government sources admit that an increasing number of citizens are surviving on one meal a day. The cause of this privation is a combination of communist policies and a U.S. trade embargo—prohibiting most exports and imports, and restricting financial transactions, travel, and commercial activity—as the government in Havana has done little to ease the burden on ordinary Cubans.
Much like its ally Venezuela, many of its citizens who have the means to leave the country have done so. At least 1 million people—about 10 percent of the population—have left the country over the past five years, of whom almost 80 percent were of working age.
Under these economic conditions Cuba has continued to depend on aid from the Venezuelan administration. Namely, though most of Venezuela’s oil output went to either China or the U.S., a significant chunk also went to Cuba, giving the regime in Havana a critical energy source. Venezuela provided 34 percent of the island’s oil imports in 2025, with Mexico and Russia making up most of the remainder—and unlike the other countries shipping crude to Cuba, Venezuela’s didn’t require cash payment.
Instead—as the president referenced in his Truth Social post—Cuba paid for the oil by providing Venezuela with educated professionals like doctors and teachers, and supporting Maduro’s intelligence and security services. Maduro used Cuban guards at his private residence, and more Cubans died protecting him—32 total—during the U.S. raid than Venezuelan troops.
A lack of oil will only exacerbate the rolling power outages and brownouts that have wracked the country since 2024, endangering systems as diverse as health care and basic food storage. The government could replace its Venezuelan oil imports with energy from other countries—but it seems it will only be able to do so if the White House agrees.
Mexico, which in recent years has produced around 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day, has proven able to increase oil exports to Cuba. In 2024, Mexico provided 79 percent of Cuba’s oil imports, and it remained Cuba’s biggest supplier last year—though at a reduced 44 percent share as Venezuela’s exports stabilized. But Mexico’s populist leftist president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has managed to craft a working relationship with the White House—in large part by increasing security cooperation with the U.S. on border issues and drug cartels—and providing large shipments of oil to Cuba, without receiving U.S. approval, may carry too high a political price.
On Thursday, Trump said the U.S. military would expand its strikes against drug cartels onto land, then declared that the “cartels are running Mexico.” A day later, Sheinbaum said, “There will be nothing of the sort in Mexico; that’s President Trump’s way of speaking,” and that the two administrations “have a relationship based on cooperation and collaboration, not subordination.” On Monday, CBS News reported that current U.S. policy would allow Mexico to ship oil to Cuba, although the amounts and pricing remain unclear.
Even if conditions in Cuba worsen further, a popular uprising seems unlikely. Anyone with resources, energy, or contacts is gone, Torres argued, meaning protest movements against the government—such as those that erupted on July 11, 2021—are much less likely to recur. “A large part of the energy of the country has left,” he said. And though the regime has struggled to feed its people and keep the lights on, it remains highly competent in crushing internal dissent.
Cuban media outlets are significantly more controlled than in Venezuela, the internet is highly restricted, and “Cuba has in essence perfected what you can call anticipatory repression,” Francisco Mora, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Western Hemisphere and former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, told TMD.
Carlos Lage, a vice president of Cuba’s Council of State—whom Mora described as a “young Turk that people looked to”—was abruptly forced to resign in 2009, admitting to undefined “errors” after Fidel Castro accused him of being seduced by the “honey of power.” It’s unclear what Lage does now.
For Cubans who openly oppose the regime, the situation is much worse. José Daniel Ferrer, an opposition activist jailed more than 100 times, accepted exile last year after reportedly being tortured in prison. “The main problem for the past three generations has been the resistance is fragmented,” Carlos Eire, a Yale University professor who has written multiple books on the Cuban exile experience, told TMD. “If any resistance group gets large enough, it’s wiped out.”
In the face of White House threats, it’s unclear what the Cuban government could offer to placate the U.S. The island doesn’t have notable supplies of natural resources; its government has been notoriously resistant to negotiated economic reforms, even when President Barack Obama moved to reestablish diplomatic relations with the country; and though Trump says he wants “a deal,” he has said nothing publicly about what that deal would entail.
One potential concession the regime could make, while maintaining its grip on power, would be to end its cooperation with U.S. adversaries. A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests there are multiple Chinese intelligence sites in Cuba, and the government—along with those of Venezuela and Nicaragua —has regularly granted access to China, Russia, and Iran.
“There is this ongoing military relationship and ongoing access that creates a problem for the U.S. in the hemisphere,” R. Evan Ellis, a professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College and former policy planning staffer for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told TMD. “You’ve got to close the open door.”
It’s possible then that Cuban exiles and their descendants—including Rubio—will see their dream come true, and the U.S. will force regime change in Cuba. But the coming year may simply bring more of what they’ve been experiencing all their lives.
“I have not sat and waited for good news from Cuba since I was 12,” Eire said. “There’s something in me, I resist any feeling of potential joy that surges up.”
