The U.S. is ratcheting up pressure on Havana’s key benefactor, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime, which has kept the Communist-ruled nation afloat with cheap oil. Now Venezuelan oil exports are at risk thanks to a partial blockade targeting sanctioned tankers—the kind that carry about 70% of the country’s crude.
One tanker that the U.S. has already seized was en route with almost two million barrels of Venezuelan oil.
The blockade adds to a U.S. pressure campaign on Maduro that also includes a major military buildup in the Caribbean, airstrikes on boats allegedly connected to Venezuelan drug trafficking and threats of bombing the country itself.
Were Venezuela’s oil shipments to stop, or sharply decline, the Cubans know it would be devastating.
“It would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, no question about it,” said Jorge Piñón, a Cuban exile who tracks the island’s energy ties to Venezuela at the University of Texas at Austin.
The threat to Cuba comes as the nation is in the throes of its most severe economic crisis since Fidel Castro and his bearded guerrillas took power in 1959—harsher and longer-lasting than the so-called Special Period after the Soviet Union unraveled in 1991.
More than 2.7 million people—about a quarter of the island’s population, many of them young and ambitious—have fled the island since 2020, hundreds of thousands of them to the U.S., according to calculations of a Havana-based demographer, Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos.
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The West’s awake!