The Wall Street Journal reports that Washington's latest strategy against Venezuela might be landing hardest 1,300 miles away—in a Cuba already buckling under its worst economic crisis in decades. The US has begun enforcing a partial blockade on Venezuelan oil exports by targeting tankers under sanctions—ships that handle roughly 70% of Venezuela's crude. Two tankers have been seized and the US is currently in pursuit of a third, notes the AP. Because Venezuela supplies about 40% of Cuba's imported fuel, analysts say a serious disruption in those flows could be catastrophic.
"It would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, no question about it," says Jorge Pinon of the University of Texas at Austin. The New York Times similarly describes Venezuelan oil as Cuba's "secret lifeline." Cuba developed particularly strong ties with Venezuela in 1999 when Hugo Chavez became president, and its intelligence agents have helped Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro fend off threats. But Cuba is unraveling at home in the meantime: The electrical grid is failing, poverty is rampant, garbage collection has broken down, water service is erratic, and diseases such as dengue and chikungunya are spreading. Since 2020, about a quarter of the population—more than 2.7 million people—has left the island, a shift one Havana-based demographer likens to the toll usually seen in war zones.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel has condemned the tanker seizures as piracy and acknowledged a "huge material shortage," while promising moves toward "macroeconomic stability." But the reality is grim. "You could say it's as bad as it can get," says Cuban economist Ricardo Torres Perez of the American University in Washington. "We also know it can get worse."
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