What oil Cuba has left is running out. Constant power cuts have closed swathes of industry and many of the hotels on which the island’s crucial tourism industry depends. Up to 80 per cent of the population is now living in deep poverty as soaring prices and shortages put basic foodstuffs and medicines beyond the reach of its people. UN officials fear a humanitarian crisis, with the outbreak of epidemics and the spread of hunger.
Cuba has experienced extreme hardship before, most notably after the collapse of its main benefactor, the Soviet Union, in 1991, and its people have developed a resilience and adaptability to such bouts of isolation. But for many the oil embargo imposed by US president Donald Trump after the US attack on its main supplier, Venezuela, has brought a new level of pain.
The island has been squeezed by a US trade and commerce embargo since 1962, more recently eased under Obama, but then reinforced last year by Trump. And now there are the restrictions on oil. The US has supplemented these measures with penal tariff threats to other countries like Mexico, should they break them. The oil embargo has been denounced by the UN as an illegal breach of human rights, and like the long-standing wider embargo has attracted international criticism. Canada has said it may assist Cuba, though has not specified how it might do so.
Trump, who insists that the US writ must run untrammelled throughout the hemisphere, increased the pressure on the island by using his now all-too-familiar, and dubious, pretext of declaring a “national emergency” over Cuba’s “unusual and extraordinary threat” against the US. Its main offences cited were association with Venezuela, Russia, China and groups like Hizbollah.
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Reports suggest that the US does not want to push Havana into complete collapse, fearing it could unleash a flood of refugees towards the Florida. Secretary of state Marco Rubio, himself a Cuban-American, travels to the region for talks with Caribbean countries today, as the US flexes its muscles and seeks to cement its influence.
