Where is the Outrage?: Now we’re starving Cubans

If you want to find the definition of “hypocrisy” in the dictionary, you don’t have to look much further than the Florida Straits, approximately 950 miles east of South Padre.

For more than 60 years, the U.S. has kept its boot on Cuba’s neck, the same relatively small island where Hemingway used to hang his hat, whose greatest “crime”— according to the beltway crowd—is clinging to a political system we say that we don’t like — communism.

But as we sit here in February 2026, the situation has moved past mere political posturing and into the realm of treating Cubans in an inhumane way, AKA, starving them to death.

After the capture last month of Nicolas Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela and long-time ally of Havana, the country went from receiving 35,000 barrels of oil a day to none, pushing it into a full-blown crisis (Source: The Telegraph).

Last month, the Trump administration, when not erasing names from the Epstein files, issued an executive order declaring a “national emergency” regarding Cuba. We’re being told that a country with a crumbling power grid and empty grocery shelves is an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States, according to the text from the White House Fact Sheet.

The remedy? A full-blown fuel blockade. By threatening to slap massive tariffs on any third-party country, like Mexico, that dares to sell oil to Havana, Trump has effectively shut off the lights.

Of course, now that the Supreme Court has rightfully ruled that his tariffs are illegal, maybe things will change, even though the president said last Friday that he’s already found a way around the Supreme Court ruling, while calling the judges who voted against his claim to invoke tariffs, “fools” and “lapdogs.”

In Cuba today, people are lucky to get four hours of electricity a day. Hospitals are doing triage by candlelight, and water pumps are sitting idle because there’s no juice to run them. (Source: International Business Times and Eurasia Review.)

The Starvation Strategy

This fuel blockade isn’t about “promoting democracy.”

You don’t promote freedom by making sure a grandma in Havana can’t refrigerate her insulin, or a mother the ability to refrigerate food for her children.

Currently, Cuba is experiencing a critical fuel shortage with only about 15 to 20 days’ worth of oil reserves remaining, according to reports from the Financial Post. This energy crunch has led to the suspension of most transport services, meaning patients often can’t even reach the few hospitals that remain open.

We are essentially trying to starve the Cuban people into a revolution, which is our strategy in Iran, only it looks like Trump is going to try and bomb them into a revolt, instead of starving them to death.

Meaning, compared to Iran, Cuba is lucky?

Starvation vs. a massive air assault.

Tough choice. Meanwhile, the president was hosting his new peace board last week, reminiscent of Jesus’s teachings – starve your fellow man to show him you love him and care.

Cuba is a “maximum pressure” campaign that treats 11 million human beings like collateral damage in a Cold War that ended before most Cubanos were even born.

We call Cuba’s government “repressive”— and it is — but what do you call a superpower that uses its massive economic weight to block a neighbor from buying the fuel it needs to keep its hospitals running? The lights on?

Ghost of Obama

It wasn’t always headed this way. Back in 2014, Barack Obama (yeah, I know, socalled conservatives hate him) famously kicked off the “Cuban Thaw,” working with Raúl Castro to restore diplomatic ties for the first time since the sixties. Obama didn’t just make it easier to travel, he practically opened a corridor.

He authorized “individual” people-to-people travel, allowed commercial flights and cruise ships to dock in Havana for the first time in decades, and even removed Cuba from the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” (SSOT) list.

That policy was designed to support the Cuban people through “increased travel and economic inter-connectedness,” according to the 2016 Presidential Policy Directive. It was a strategy of engagement rather than strangulation.

During his first term, beholden to Republican Cubans in Florida, Trump scrubbed what had been a working relationship between the two countries.

He has since ratcheted up the game to now include starving them to death.

While we’re doing that, starving Cubans because they live under communism, we’re doing billion-dollar trade deals with perhaps the largest communist country on earth, brutal as are all dictatorships, mainland China.

Makes sense.