With Little Help on Horizon, Cuban Regime Increasingly Isolated

Havana is near collapse, with no relief offered by longtime ally Russia or biggest trading partner China. But the island nation has survived such crises before.

Residents prepare a soup over an open fire during a blackout following the failure of a major power plant in Havana, Cuba, on Oct. 19, 2024. Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo

Cuba is on the verge of economic collapse, and there’s no immediate relief on tap from longtime patron Russia or Cuba’s biggest trading partner, China.

Its tenuous ties to nearby Mexico are likely to be severed soon, leaving the island nation seemingly out of options for replacing the discounted oil it imported from Venezuela to fuel its economy and provide the communist regime with hard currency.

But there is, perhaps, a solution being dangled by the oil’s new proprietor, the United States.

“There will be no more oil or money going to Cuba—Zero! I strongly suggest they make a deal, before it’s too late,” President Donald Trump wrote on Jan. 11 on Truth Social, mostly in all caps.

The president didn’t elaborate on what such a deal would entail, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents left Cuba for Florida in the 1950s, outlined a possible arrangement during a Jan. 9 White House meeting with oil executives.

“The people in control in Cuba have a choice to make,“ Rubio said. ”They can either have a real country with a real economy, where their people can prosper, or they can continue with their failing dictatorship that’s going to lead to systemic and societal collapse.”

Although Russia, Cuba’s staunchest ally for more than 60 years, and Cuba’s largest trading partners, China and Spain, have criticized the United States for seizing Venezuela’s oil, none has made a commitment to provide additional support for the island.

‘Things Falling Apart’

Because heavily discounted crude oil from Venezuela is now under the management of the Trump administration, since the Jan. 3 raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez’s choices are limited.

Cuba’s gross domestic product has declined 10 percent since 2019, according to the Cuban economy minister, Reuters reported. Its economy has shrunk by at least 15 percent since 2018, according to the Michigan Journal of Economics.

The average annual inflation rate has stood at more than 26 percent since 2005, according to the country’s official data.

Food, medicine, and fuel shortages are a fact of daily life.

More than 2.7 million Cubans—nearly a quarter of its population—have fled since 2020, according to a July 2024 report published by Columbia Law School.

Rolling blackouts often cripple its antiquated grid for hours, forcing “non-essential” workplaces and schools to close, straining its struggling agricultural and tourism industries, Cuban state-run news website Cubadebate reported.

Not only did Cuba import an average of 27,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela between January and November in 2025—according to shipping data and documents from Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA reported by Reuters—but also, Havana resold a significant percentage for much-needed cash.

In 2011, Cuba’s oil imports from Venezuela were 100,000 barrels a day, according to a 2015 report presented to the U.S. International Trade Commission by Cuba expert Jorge R. Piñon.

Often, in mid-sea transfers to shadow fleet tankers engaged in what the United States defines as the “illicit movement of sanctioned oil” to third-party buyers, mostly in China and India.

“So you’ve got all these things falling apart, and it gets to be connected with, ‘Well, OK, how long is the government of Cuba going to last?’” said Gregory Copley, president of the Washington-based International Strategic Studies Association and an opinion contributor to The Epoch Times.

“Like Venezuela, the answer to that is ‘not very long.’”

Cuba has survived decades of U.S.-imposed sanctions since Fidel Castro led a 1959 revolution that established communist rule.

Although there was widespread unrest in 2021 in response to food and fuel shortages, no organized opposition to the Díaz-Canel regime has materialized.

“We saw protests, but there were only 100 arrests, and it really wasn’t something big enough to overthrow the government,” said Anders Corr, publisher at Journal of Political Risk and another Epoch Times opinion contributor.

“So it’s difficult. I’m not sure that economic sanctions at the moment are able to do much,” he told The Epoch Times.

“Ultimately, it has to come from the people. They have to overthrow their government in Cuba, and the government in Cuba just seems to be propagandizing them.”

He said that because of such propaganda, many Cubans believe the United States is the source of all their woes.

The Cienfuegos oil refinery, southeast of Havana on Feb. 11, 2013. Jean-Herve Deiller/AFP/Getty Images

US–Cuba Trade

Despite that it has placed embargoes on Cuba since the early 1960s, the United States is among Cuba’s leading sources for chicken, pork, cereals, and oils.

Under the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act, there are 52 companies—more than 40 in South Florida—licensed to conduct cash-only transactions in Cuba.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the companies shipped $654 million in goods to Cuba in 2025, up significantly from the $450 million cited by Trading Economics in 2022–2023.

In a Jan. 9 report, the New York-based U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council states that U.S. exports to Cuba increased by 13.3 percent from January 2025 through October 2025 compared with January 2024 through October 2024.

This makes the United States Cuba’s third-largest trading partner.

According to the U.N.’s Comtrade data for 2022–2023 assembled by Trading Economics, China ($1.13 billion), Spain ($995.93 million), the United States ($450 million), Argentina ($344.93 million), Mexico ($341.94 million), and Brazil ($335.72 million) are Cuba’s biggest trade partners.

Cuba mainly imports food, cereals, fuel, diesel engines, vehicles, motor parts, and vegetable oils.

Its primary exports are nickel, cane sugar, cigars, rum, metallic ores, and fish.

Its 2022–2023 trade deficit was $6.6 billion, Trading Economics reported.

Although the United States is blocking Venezuelan oil from reaching Cuba, the embargo does not affect the cash-only sales.

Tenuous Mexico Oil Link

Mexico is now Havana’s largest and last reliable oil supplier. But that lifeline may soon be severed by the Trump administration’s pressure.

In the first nine months of 2025, Mexico shipped 19,200 barrels of oil a day to Cuba, according to state-owned Petróleos Mexicanos.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Jan. 7 that Petróleos Mexicanos is shipping the same amount of oil to Cuba that it is contracted to send as part of a “humanitarian aid” exchange between the countries.

During a hearing on Dec. 17, 2025, before the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), the daughter of immigrants who fled Cuba’s communist regime, said that although Mexico has a “non-intervention foreign policy,” it supports “the Castro tyranny.”

Between August and mid-December 2025, she said, Mexico sent 55 oil tankers “worth more than $3 billion, for free” to Cuba and “accepted more than 3,000 Cuban doctors in exchange for over $100 million paid directly to the Cuban regime, not to the doctors themselves.”

Mexico is among more than 20 nations that participate in Cuba’s medical program, a foreign policy cornerstone since the 1960s that the U.S. State Department defines as a “medical diplomacy scam” based on human trafficking and forced labor.

When the United States–Mexico–Canada trade pact is renegotiated in 2026, Mexico will be reminded that the pact prohibits “forced labor,” Salazar said.

Expressing frustration over Mexico’s oil shipments to Cuba and inability to take down the cartels, Trump said on Jan. 8 that the United States could soon carry out strikes on Mexican cartels.

The vessel tanker Bella 1 at Singapore Strait, after U.S. officials say the U.S. Coast Guard pursued an oil tanker in international waters near Venezuela, in this picture taken from social media on March 18, 2025. Hakon Rimmereid/via Reuters

Constrained Russia

Moscow was Cuba’s ideological and economic patron for more than 30 years until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and ensuing economic upheaval.

Russia’s limited engagement in the Caribbean for a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union constrained its capacity to materially aid Havana until the early 2010s.

Since the Soviet era, when heavily subsidized Ural crude was shipped to the island in support of its Marxist ally, Russia has changed, but Cuba hasn’t.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, still financing its war in Ukraine, cannot afford to give away oil, and Cuba cannot afford to buy it.

Logistics also play a part. It can take 40 days for a tanker to travel from the Baltic Sea to Cuba, preventing Russia from reliably replacing Venezuelan oil, especially when it can get better prices in Asian markets.

There are multi-layered sanctions imposed on Russian oil exports by the United States, the European Union, and the G7 over its invasion of Ukraine.

In early 2025, the Trump administration sanctioned 183 vessels that are now part of Russia’s shadow fleet, tankers flying false flags to orchestrate illicit movement of banned crude to third-party buyers.

Since December 2025, the United States has seized five shadow fleet ships, including the Jan. 7 capture of a Russian-flagged tanker in the North Atlantic.

In October 2025, the United States also imposed new sanctions on Russian producers Rosneft and Lukoil, which account for roughly half of Russia’s oil exports, blacklisting them from making transactions with U.S. dollars and, thus, deterring international banks, including those in China and India, from conducting trade deals with these companies.

Russia, however, has signed several pacts with Cuba since 2023 after resuming sporadic oil shipments the year before: 4.4 million barrels, half of Cuba’s annual demand, in 2022; 1.5 million barrels in 2023; and 750,000 barrels in 2024, before virtually none in 2025.

In May 2023, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed a deal for Rosneft to supply 12 million barrels of oil a year to Cuba and to lend technical assistance in developing Cuba’s Boca de Jaruco oil deposit.

Those shipments have not materialized and, because Rosneft is now blacklisted, are unlikely to manifest in a consistent, reliable manner.

In May 2025, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, while attending a ribbon-cutting for the reopening of a Havana-area steel mill financed with $100 million from Russian companies, announced that Russian industry would invest $1 billion in Cuba by 2030, specifically in improving the nation’s electricity grid and agriculture production.

Chernyshenko also pledged that Russians would reignite Cuba’s ailing tourist industry, which has not rebounded since the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s 2019 ban on visits to the island by U.S. cruise ships.

From a 2018 peak of 4.7 million tourists, only 2.2 million visited Cuba in 2024, according to Cuban regime and industry data.

The number of Russian tourists, however, increased from less than 55,000 in 2022 to nearly 185,000 in 2023, and Chernyshenko said that more than 200,000 Russians would book flights to Havana in 2025 and that even more would in the coming years.

On Oct. 8, 2025, Russia and Cuba formally ratified the latest of their defense pacts.

Although it is not a formal component of the covenant, according to the Miami-based Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, at least 20,000 Cubans have joined the Russian army since 2022.

Cuban security forces pose alongside their Chinese trainers in a Cuban government training school in 2016. Courtesy of ADN Cuba

Cautious China

China has been one of Cuba’s most significant trading partners since the early 2000s and its largest in the past decade, according to Trading Economics, which calculates that Chinese–Cuban trade topped $1.1 billion in 2022.

Cuba has been a Belt and Road Initiative signatory since 2016.

Chinese Communist Party-subsidized Nuctech Co. is contracted by the Havana regime to operate Cuban airports, seaports, and customs enforcement.

Chinese technology corporations, including U.S.-blacklisted Huawei and ZTE, manage the island’s telecommunications infrastructure.

In 2024, direct flights between China and Cuba were established, and 27,000 Chinese visitors flew to the island.

China, one of the largest purchasers of Venezuelan oil, has no petroleum to offer Cuba, but state-sponsored corporations are financing 94 solar electricity projects that, by 2028, could provide enough electricity to meet nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s power demand.

Allegations that the military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was active in Cuba have circulated since 1999.

China operates four signals intelligence sites on the island, less than 90 miles from Florida. The four are Bejucal, which is the former Soviet missile site that spurred the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and installations at Wajay, Calabazar, and El Salao, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The CCP installations are tracking 20 sensitive U.S. military and technology sites, Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Congress in 2025.

China, which has been critical of how Havana’s old school communist regime runs the island’s economy and suggested reforms allowing more private ownership, has issued boilerplate condemnations of U.S. actions in Venezuela but otherwise said or done little.

China has become South America’s largest source of infrastructure investment and second-largest trading partner, increasing trade from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion in 2022.

In an analysis published on Jan. 12, Berg wrote that it’s clear “the Trump administration hopes to preside over a reduction in China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere,” specifically in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

“Of course, China will continue to pursue its multifaceted, long-term strategy in the Western Hemisphere, leveraging its familiar economic tools to open doors,” Berg said.

“That will not change—China has too much to lose in the region. But Beijing will have to recalibrate and think more carefully about U.S. redlines, how much it wants to support other embattled regimes in the region.”