Is Cuba About to Collapse?

The dramatic change in Venezuela's leadership is going to have impacts around the world, but probably most significantly in Cuba, which has relied on Venezuela for fuel for decades.

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 will worsen and its shortages of food, medicine and basic goods will 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 current crisis on long-running US sanctions. But declining shipments of Venezuelan crude are also a factor.

The lack of fuel is leading to massive, economy-crushing blackouts in Cuba.

The blackouts in Cuba have been happening for years but have been more significant in the past couple years. The most recent major blackout happened just last month. Before that there was another major blackout in September.

A blackout hit Havana and the rest of the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people without power on an island struggling with chronic outages blamed on a crumbling electric grid...

The outage followed two days of peak-hour power shortages across the island.

A total blackout hit Cuba in September, with officials blaming aging infrastructure and fuel shortages at power plants. The ongoing outages also affect water service and impact the island's fragile business sector.

So that's the situation Cuba was in before their benefactor Maduro was taken to a jail in New York. In the wake of that operation, some reporters asked President Trump if he was planning similar military action against Cuba. Trump responded that he didn't see any point. Cuba would collapse on its own.

“Cuba looks like it is ready to fall,” Mr. Trump said to reporters on Air Force One. “I don’t know if they’re going to hold out, but Cuba now has no income. They got all their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil.”

Pressed about the prospect of the United States’ intervening militarily in Cuba, Mr. Trump said he did not think it was necessary because “it looks like it’s going down.”

Cuba itself and other outside experts seem to agree with that conclusion. Cuba won't last long without Venezuela's oil.

Mr. Maduro’s overthrow “places us in a critical existential dilemma for our survival as nation states and independent, sovereign nations,” Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba’s foreign minister, said Sunday at an emergency meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a bloc of regional nations. He appealed to neighboring countries to stand together in the face of Washington’s threats.

“It’s a death sentence if tomorrow Venezuela shuts off oil to Cuba,” said Jorge Piñon, a former Mexican oil executive and Cuban energy expert who works at the University of Texas at Austin...

Already, citizens line up for hours or even days to get the most basic items like cooking fuel or milk and endure rolling electricity blackouts that spoil what little food they do have when their refrigerators shut off. The medical system — a gold lining of the revolution — is now barely able to provide the most basic care. Patients and their families report shortages of medicine and people are now expected to bring their own sheets to the hospital, according to Cubans in the U.S. who have sent money to help family members.

The situation has prompted a mass migration of Cubans: the island has lost 10 percent of its population, or 1 million people, since 2021. Part of the downward spiral is because of sanctions imposed by the United States, but analysts say a larger culprit is poor economic management by the Cuban government.

For a while, Venezuela's shipments of oil to Cuba were being bolstered by about 22,000 barrels per day coming from Mexico. But those shipments were cut back significantly last year, down to about 7,000 barrels. For now, Cuba's president is talking tough about fighting to the death.

At a protest Saturday in front of the US Embassy in Havana, a defiant Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel promised not to let the Cuba-Venezuela alliance go down without a fight.

“For Venezuela, of course for Cuba, we are willing to give even our own life, but at a heavy cost,” Diaz-Canel proclaimed.

There's some truth to that. Cubans made up many of the elite guards around Nicolas Maduro and Cuba says as many as 32 Cubans were killed during the US raid.

The Cuban government said on Sunday that 32 of its citizens were killed during the U.S. raid on Venezuela to extract President Nicolas Maduro for prosecution in the United States.

Havana said there would be two days of mourning on January 5 and 6 in honor of those killed and said funeral arrangements would be announced...

"True to their responsibilities concerning security and defense, our compatriots fulfilled their duty with dignity and heroism and fell, after fierce resistance, in direct combat against the attackers or as a result of bombings on the facilities," the statement said.

President Trump probably doesn't want to see a complete collapse in Cuba. As mentioned above, about a million Cubans have already fled the country, which is only 90 miles from Florida. A complete collapse in which Cuba had no hope of restoring electricity in the near term could send millions more people fleeing for survival and many of them would likely wind up at our border. So it's possible the Trump administration may want to stabilize things before they reach that stage. Whether that comes before or after the communist government collapses remains to be seen.

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2026/01/05/is-cuba-about-to-collapse-n3810503