Cuba and the U.S.: Understanding Rising Tensions and Negotiations - critical summary review

Cuba is an island of around 10 million people some 150 kilometres from Florida, and the United States has kept a trade embargo on it since 1962. The hostility dates from the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, which installed a communist government that Washington has treated as an adversary ever since, through the Bay of Pigs invasion, the missile crisis and six decades of sanctions.

What makes the current chapter different is energy. Cuba's electricity comes largely from oil-fired thermal plants, and the country produces far less crude than it burns, so the power grid depends on what arrives by ship. When the ships stop, everything stops: blackouts that in many parts of the island last at least 20 hours a day, according to economist Omar Everleny, former director of the Centre for Cuban Economic Studies at the University of Havana, plus cancelled flights, closed hotels, uncollected rubbish and tens of thousands of postponed surgeries, as President Miguel Díaz-Canel described it in March.

That is the backdrop for the news. Since January, Washington's policy has run on two tracks at once: an economic and rhetorical squeeze that has reached explicit talk of military intervention, and a bilateral negotiating channel that has already produced the release of prisoners and an offer of humanitarian aid. Neither track has displaced the other.

How Cuba ran out of oil

The turning point was Venezuela. On 3 January, a US military operation in Caracas captured Nicolás Maduro, who is now jailed in the United States facing federal drug-trafficking charges and has pleaded not guilty. Venezuela had been Cuba's main fuel supplier, sending an average of around 46,500 barrels a day before the intervention, according to figures from the data firm Kpler cited by the Financial Times. That flow ended.

Mexico became the main alternative, and then it too stopped. State oil company Pemex suspended tanker shipments to Havana in mid-January. On 29 January, Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency over Cuba, arguing that the island's government "is designed to harm the United States and support hostile countries", and threatening tariffs on any country that supplies it with oil. President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico's shipments were humanitarian, meant to keep hospitals and essential services running, and warned that tariffs on suppliers "could trigger a humanitarian crisis of major proportions".

By mid-March, Díaz-Canel said no fuel had entered Cuba in three months. The pressure landed on an economy already shrinking: Cuba's output contracted 15% between 2020 and 2025, and international tourism, the main source of hard currency, closed 2025 with fewer than two million visitors, the worst figure in more than 20 years outside the pandemic.

From sanctions to an aircraft carrier

Trump has said repeatedly that Cuba is next. He has spoken of having "the honour of taking over Cuba", adding that it "could be a friendly takeover, or not", and that he can do "whatever I want" with the country. In April, the newspaper USA Today reported that the Pentagon had stepped up planning for a possible military operation, awaiting presidential orders. The Defense Department replied that it would not speculate on "hypothetical scenarios" and that the armed forces "remain prepared to execute the president's orders".

The escalation became concentrated in a single week in May. On 18 May, Washington sanctioned Cuban ministers, military commanders and intelligence bodies. On 20 May, which Washington marks as Cuba's independence day and Havana does not, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted Raúl Castro, 94, over the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft flown by Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based Cuban exile group. The charges include four counts of murder and two of destruction of aircraft, with five other defendants named. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the United States "expects him to appear here, of his own will or otherwise".

The same day, the US military announced the arrival of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its escort ships in the Caribbean. Southern Command said they were taking part in maritime exercises with Latin American partners that began in March.

The parallel channel

Running alongside all of this, there has been talking. Trump said from mid-January that his government was already in contact with the island's leadership, and in February he floated a "friendly takeover": "They have no money, they have nothing now, but they are talking to us."

On 12 March, Havana announced the release of 51 prisoners, described by the Cuban government as a gesture of goodwill towards the Vatican, the historic mediator between the two countries. The next day, Díaz-Canel confirmed on state television that Cuban officials had held talks with US representatives "to find solutions, through dialogue, to the bilateral differences between our two nations", and said he had led the Cuban side together with Raúl Castro. American media have reported that Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson and bodyguard of Raúl Castro, acted as an interlocutor with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. CIA director John Ratcliffe delivered a list of demands in Havana, according to CNN.

The humanitarian track moved too. Washington authorised a limited amount of oil to enter for humanitarian reasons, and on 20 May Rubio published a video message in Spanish offering $100 million in food and medicine, to be distributed by the Catholic Church or other charities Washington considers reliable. The following day he said Cuba had accepted the offer.

What each side says

Rubio's position is that diplomacy "remains our preference with Cuba", followed immediately by a caveat: "being honest, the likelihood of that happening, considering who we are dealing with, is not high." He calls the island a national security threat because of its ties to Russia and China, and attributes the shortages to the government: "the real reason you have no electricity, fuel or food is that those who control your country have looted billions."

Havana's position is that nothing on its political system is negotiable. Deputy foreign minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said Cuba is "not prepared to discuss our constitutional system, just as we assume the United States is not prepared to discuss theirs". Díaz-Canel has said he will not resign: "we have a free and sovereign state, we enjoy self-determination and independence." Foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez called the indictment part of an attempt "to instigate a military aggression", denied that Cuba threatens US security, and at a press conference in Havana said there were no negotiations or agendas under way, "although it remains available to maintain contact". He put the cost of the embargo at more than $8 billion over the past year.

Outside both governments, UN secretary-general António Guterres warned Cuba risks a "humanitarian collapse" without fuel imports, and UN experts said in February that the oil blockade threatened supplies indispensable for electricity, water and sanitation, hospitals, public transport and food production. Lee Schlenker, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argued the indictment may backfire if the aim was concessions: "I think this will be a death sentence for any possible deal with Cuba."

Seventy years of cycles

The two-track pattern is not new. Washington and Havana have alternated between confrontation and thaw for decades. Barack Obama met Raúl Castro in Panama in 2015, the first summit between leaders of the two countries in more than 50 years, and visited Cuba in 2016, the first trip by a sitting US president in 88 years. Trump reversed much of that in his first term, restoring travel and trade restrictions and returning Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Little changed under Joe Biden. The relationship has never settled into either state for long.

What to do with this information

Both governments are producing a great deal of rhetoric, and the rhetoric is the least reliable guide to what is actually happening. Three concrete signals are worth more attention than the statements.

The first is oil. Mexico's shipments were suspended in mid-January after the tariff threat; whether they resume, and at what volume, is the practical thermometer of how tight the blockade really is, and of how far Washington is willing to let the energy crisis run.

The second is the Raúl Castro indictment. Rubio declined to say how the United States would bring him in, asking reporters: "if we were trying to bring him, why would I tell the media what our plans are?" Whether the case produces a concrete attempt to take custody of a 94-year-old former president inside Cuba, or stays on paper as leverage, will show which of the two tracks the charge was meant to serve.

The third is the Nimitz. Southern Command describes its presence in the Caribbean as part of exercises with regional partners that began in March. Whether those ships stay on that schedule or reposition toward the island is the clearest available indicator, since analysts cited by CNN note that no large-scale build-up of the kind that preceded the operations in Venezuela and Iran has so far been reported near Cuba.

Looking at those three signals rather than at the next statement, which one would actually change your reading of where this is heading?