“Cuba is fully entitled to trade for fuel with any country, without restrictions, conditions, or questioning that contravene freedom of international trade,” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said April 14.
Rodríguez condemned the U.S. rulers’ economic strangulation of Cuba, intensified by the Donald Trump administration’s Jan. 29 executive order imposing a blockade on oil imports to the island. Washington threatened tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba without U.S. permission.
After more than three months of no fuel coming from any country, Washington permitted a Russian tanker to dock March 31 and unload crude, which Cuba used to generate electricity and for key production operations, hospitals and other essential services.
The Russian shipment gave a brief reprieve to millions across the island, who have borne hourslong rolling outages that have aggravated every aspect of their lives. Eight similar-sized boatloads would be needed each month to meet the country’s electrical needs, Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said on Cuban national television April 24.
Washington’s blockade and recent war threats are a sharp escalation of the decadeslong bipartisan course of the U.S. capitalist rulers, who are determined to destroy Cuba’s socialist revolution.
The policy “to exert economic pressure through energy supplies to provoke political destabilization” was not invented by Trump, Harvard professor Rainer Schultz said in an April 10 article on the Cuban website CubaDebate. It was titled, “The eternal strategy: Cuba’s current blackout began in 1960 in the Washington archives.” Trump just “intensified it,” said Schultz.
He explains that as early as March 1960 the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration had planned to cut off Cuba’s oil supply as part of its plans to overthrow the young revolutionary government that came to power on Jan. 1, 1959, under the leadership of Fidel Castro. Schultz said the plan was “as simple as it was brutal.”
Robert Anderson, then secretary of the treasury, told the National Security Council, “If we succeed in depriving the Cubans of their oil supply, the consequences would be devastating within five to six weeks.”
For seven decades, the U.S. rulers have used all available means to shut down revenue sources for the Cuban people — banning trade, financial transactions and investment, systematically cutting off access to international credit, restricting U.S. travel to Cuba, pressuring governments worldwide to terminate medical cooperation programs with Cuba — with the stated goal of provoking “hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of the Cuban government.”
Imperialism, not a ‘policy’
Prior to the popular overthrow of the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in January 1959, Washington did in Cuba what it tries to do everywhere. Working with compliant governments — whether “democratic” or military dictatorships — Washington uses its power to impose the “order,” “tranquility,” and “favorable investment climate” demanded by U.S. bosses.
In addition to having a subservient government in the Batista regime, U.S. capitalists had dominant control over Cuba’s land, ports, mines, banking and all of the country’s exports and imports. Cuba was a virtual appendage of the U.S. bosses, which meant the country’s economic and social development was sacrificed in pursuit of profits.
Upon taking state power, Cuban workers and peasants mobilized to take control of and run the country’s resources for the benefit of the vast majority. The U.S. rulers moved to block their progress.
Attempting to implement Anderson’s plan, Standard Oil, Texaco and Shell, the three foreign monopolies controlling Cuba’s oil production, allowed their crude oil inventories to fall in order to create scarcity. At the same time, their refineries refused to process crude that Cuba obtained from the Soviet Union.
In response, the new Cuban government, exercising its sovereign right, nationalized the U.S.-owned refineries in June 1960. This was followed by a wave of nationalizations of other foreign-owned banks and industries.
For U.S. imperialism, the example of a small Latin American nation standing up to Washington could not be tolerated, and every U.S. administration has sought to erase it ever since.
The recent oil blockade has had a crippling effect on Cuba’s economy. Without electricity, tourism has plummeted. The sugar harvest was halted as the mills were at a standstill.
In the face of this onslaught, the Cuban government has accelerated moves to develop solar and other ways to generate electricity.
By the end of 2025, 34 solar farms with a capacity of 1.2 gigawatts had been constructed. But importing more solar panels and batteries to store and dispense energy would take a major capital investment, which Cuba simply can’t afford.
Cuba has had to resort to offering concessions to foreign capitalist investors to acquire technology and supplies. Mariel Solar, the island’s first privately owned, large-scale energy project in Cuba, opened in 2022 as a joint venture with U.K.-based Hive Energy and the Chinese multinational Shanghai Electric Group Company.
Chinese companies shipped $117 million worth of solar panels to Cuba in 2025, up from $48 million in 2024, the Financial Times reported.
In addition to large-scale solar energy infrastructure, some 15,000 solar kits have been installed in homes and medical centers across the island. The government has advanced measures, including tax exemptions and other incentives, to both state-owned and private enterprises to import and install solar panels and other renewable energy sources.