Why the US Is Targeting Cuba Again: Economic Warfare and Historical Tensions

It's no secret that Donald Trump's on to Cuba. Free it, take it. Think I could do anything I want with it. And from history, we know that the US and Cuba haven't really got on, but it feels like things are about to get a lot worse. And Cuba's next, by the way, but pretend I didn't say that, please. And it's not just about what the US could do, but what's already happening. It's a form of economic warfare. People aren't just ignoring this and hoping it'll just go away. They are actually very scared. So, what's the US's problem with Cuba right now? How much of it is to do with their past? And how much of it is actually just to do

with this president? I'm Oliver Aikido Lam and this is Sky News Explains. Okay, we're going to start somewhere a little bit unusual, but stick with me. Think about how much you rely on electricity every day to charge one of these, keep your fridge on, watch this video, and now imagine being without it. But it's not just you. It's the whole country. That's what it's like for over 10 million people living in Cuba who experience blackouts for sometimes 20 hours a day. Well, I'm in quite a small town, few hours outside of the capital, Havana, and in the midst of uh yet another blackout. That's my colleague Stuart, who's our

chief correspondent and has been reporting from inside Cuba. People have found ways around it by using batteries or have some solar panels, but mainly uh they have nothing. And the situation, people here tell us, is getting literally worse by uh the day and the week. But why do these blackouts happen? and what's it got to do with the US? Let's start with how Cuba gets its energy. Most of Cuba's energy system was designed and engineered decades ago during the Soviet era, but since then, the government hasn't really modernize the system, and that's a major reason why the system keeps failing and causing

those blackouts. And on top of that, guess what? The system relies on oil. The country gets over 80% of its total energy supply from oil. And maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing if they could produce it themselves. But Cuba really relies on getting its oil from other countries. The main countries that provide Cuba with oil include Mexico, Russia, and Algeria. But its biggest and most important supplier is Venezuela. And that relationship hasn't really been the same since January where the US launched this huge military raid where they captured the leader Nicholas Maduro. Yeah, that's him in the tracksuit and the handcuffs being taken to the States. And after that, Trump made it really clear things would not go

back to normal. And he posted this 5 days later saying that there will be no more oil or money going to Cuba. Zero. So now Venezuela's out the picture, but it gets a lot worse. Trump also said that any country that sends oil to Cuba now could face huge tariffs while trading with the US. The result? Well, Cuba's been practically cut off and oil imports have dramatically dropped and that's already on top of decades of US sanctions, which we'll get to. It's a form of economic warfare. The strategy behind these economic sanctions is to cause so much pain in Cuba. The ordinary that the government finally surrenders to Trump's terms, it really leaves the Cubans sort of no room to

maneuver. The oil blockade has also been criticized by UN human rights experts who called it a serious violation of international law. But I wanted to know more about the impact that this is having on millions of people in Cuba. So I caught up with Stuart when he got back. It affects all of society, every single bit of it. Even in hospitals that are running on generators, which can only last for so long, all medical assistants come to a stop. If you don't have refrigeration, medicine will go off. But one of the big things that we noticed there is this is food the food crisis. It really is a massive issue. We saw people going through the streets, going through bins looking for anything they

could to eat. Now a lot of this is definitely part of economic mismanagement that sums up uh Cuba over many decades. None of it helped of course by the fuel embargo that started at the beginning of the year. And so society is really struggling on levels they tell us that they hadn't seen before. And this oil blockade which started at the beginning of the year is still going on. But there was one exception. Let's go back to that graph on oil imports. And you may have spotted this spike. That's where Russia comes in. On the 29th of March, ship tracking data shows this Russian oil tanker approaching Cuba carrying over 700,000 barrels of oil. That's enough oil to fuel the country for about a week. And you might think,

hang on, I thought the US was threatening tariffs on anyone sending oil to Cuba. But for Russia, Trump had a different rule. We don't mind having somebody get a boatload cuz they need they have to survive. It wouldn't bother me. So why did he let them in? That may signal that the administration itself is concerned about social collapse on the island and the problems that would pose for the United States. So they want to keep uh strangling the Cuban economy just enough to make it hurt but not enough to kill it. So you can see how complicated Cuba's energy crisis is. You've got a system that's already broken and on top of that

a US oil blockade that's choking the supply. Cuba is ready to fall. You know, Cuba looks like it's ready to fall. But to really understand why the US is going after Cuba again, we've got to look at how they became a target in the first place, spoiler alert, it's communism. Let's start in 1959 with the Cuban Revolution. This was the communist takeover led by Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Shaperara that saw the USbacked dictator Fhensio Batista removed from power. And it was a huge moment in Cuban history and it led to the creation of the one party communist state that we see today. To some Cubans, Castro was a hero, but he also imposed restrictions on basic freedoms. For the

US, it posed a major threat. Not only was Cuba now allied with the US's biggest rival at the time, the Soviet Union, but the threat was on America's doorstep, literally. Let me show you. There's only around 90 miles between the two countries. And you can see it here. Another major event a couple of years later was the botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs. It was a CIA backed attempt by Cuban exiles who tried but failed to overthrow Castro's government. That was a major embarrassment for the US. But 1962 is one of the most pivotal years for the US and Cuba. And this bit's really important. President JFK brought in a huge trade embargo. Not only did it

basically ban all trade with Cuba, but it's still in place today. The impact on Cuba's government has been massive. Last year, the Cuban government estimated that the US embargo has cost the country around $170 billion in damages. That same year, the US and the Soviet Union were on the brink of an allout nuclear war after Soviet missiles were found in Cuba. You probably know that as the Cuban missile crisis. But the US really wanted Castro out. And if an attempted coup wasn't enough, there were multiple CIA backed attempts to assassinate him. Over the years, Castro's government faced its own challenges. Not everyone was happy. And one way to measure that is the fact that people tried to leave. For years, Fidel

Castro prevented most Cubans from moving to the US, and those who did were seen as counterrevolutionaries. But in 1980, he gave in. And in a 6-month period, almost 125,000 Cubans left for America. But another blow came to his government in 1991. That's when Cuba lost its biggest ally, the Soviet Union. That sent the country's economy spiraling, and the embargo that we spoke about, that's still in place. Poverty on the island rose. There were blackouts across the country, and more Cubans left. And the US does have a base in Cuba, Guantanamo Bay. You might know it as the detention facility that was opened after 9/11. This actually goes way back to before the revolution when America

leased the land from Cuba. But for some Cubans, it's an unwelcome reminder of past US control. Despite all that, Castro stayed in power until 2008 when his brother Raul took over. And that marked a new chapter in relations as it was also the year this man became president. We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries. Barack Obama eased sanctions on Cuba and tried to reset relations. So for a while things relaxed politically. More tourists visited the island and Cuba saw an economic boost. But Trump first became president in 2017 and reversed a lot of what Obama had put

in place. And remember that US embargo was never lifted. Cuba's current president, Miguel Diaz Canel, became the first non-Castro leader of the communist government in 2018. But when Trump came back into office in 2025, the temperature went back up. So that brings us on to why Donald Trump's going after Cuba right now. There are a few reasons and could one of them be his ego? I do believe I'll be the honor of having taking Cuba. Every US president has aspired to seeing the Cuban government change and be pulled back into the orbit of the United States. If Donald Trump can claim this as a legacy, I'm sure that he would be

excited by that possibility. It's also pretty interesting to look at how Trump describes Cuba as a threat. Take a look at this document. At the start of the year, Trump published this executive order, which is basically a way for the president to direct the government without running it by Congress first, although sometimes they can try and block them. And he announced a national emergency and said the actions of the government of Cuba constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat. And he says that Cuba is aligning itself with numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States. And he lists countries like Russia and China. And it's not the first

time the US has been suspicious of China and Cuba. So according to the Trump administration, Cuba does still pose an extraordinary threat to America's national security. Just looking at this executive order though on its own in isolation, you can see how some parts of it might actually be quite convincing. But when I looked at what Stuart's team filmed inside Havana, what it really looks like, how people are living, it's not really the Cuba that you might think of. And it just makes you wonder how much of an imminent and urgent threat can this island really be, at least in comparison to that historical threat of communism. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba really doesn't have

the capacity to pose any kind of national security threat to the United States. Washington has been concerned about the fact that Cuba has a good relationship with China and still has a good relationship with Russia, but those are primarily commercial rather than military relations and so they don't pose any real threat. But you can't really talk about Cuba in isolation. There's a bit of a pattern. To further enhance our national security, my administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal. The United States conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela.

We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we're working with everybody involved to try and get it. And I think we're going to get it one way or the other. we're going to get it. And those are just some of the countries that he's targeted since coming back into the White House last year. I think it's all to do with uh President Trump's view, his world vision, his demand that the Western Hemisphere comes completely under his control. Okay. Stuart mentioned the Western Hemisphere and that's linked to something called the Don Row doctrine. The Donro doctrine. It's a play on the Monroe Doctrine and that was written by the US President James Monroe all the way back in 1823. I had to Google who

that was. Monroe Donroe, you can see where he's coming from. Monroe basically suggested that the Western Hemisphere, so from here back this way, was the US's zone of influence and warned Europe to stay out. Then in 1904, it was expanded to justify American intervention throughout the region. And Trump's made it clear that this Donro doctrine is his vision for America. Sort of reviving this idea of US dominance. We got to have peace. It's our hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine was very important when it was done and other presidents, a lot of them, they lost sight of it. I didn't lose sight. That gonro doctrine has is asserting the right of the United States to in effect

try to get rid of regimes that have historically been adversarial. And so Venezuela was first. Cuba is on the agenda next. But there's someone we've not mentioned who's very involved when it comes to all things Cuba. We're dealing with Cuba. Marco, do you want to say a couple of words about it? and the people in charge are they don't know how to fix it. That's Marco Rubio. He's the US Secretary of State, Trump's leading foreign affairs guy and he's also Cubaname. Marco Rubio built his political career on being the most vocal anti-Castro person in the United States Congress. It's a nonsensical system and the people of Cuba are suffering. And what he wants with Cuba really matters in the US. America has a big

Cuban diaspora and many of them want the communist government out. I was a dissident in Cuba. I was in jail. I was harassed. I was persecuted by the regime. Rubio is a product of the Cuban American community in Miami. He understands instinctively what needs to be done. But how much influence does he actually have? There may be differences between Rubio and Trump on what the endg game should look like. We've heard that Rubio's been involved in some of the talks between US and Cuban representatives, but it's not even clear what's on the table. What is clear is that the Cuban president said he's not going to give in to any US pressure.

Watch this. If the time comes, I don't think there would be any justification for the United States to uh launch a military aggression against Cuba or for the US to undertake a surgical operation or the kidnapping of a president. If that happens, there'll be fighting and there'll be a struggle and we'll defend ourselves and if we need to die, we'll die. If the Cuban government was to fall, it could actually be pretty bad for the US president. I think the administration is playing a risky game with the oil blockade because it is plunging the Cuban economy into very deep crisis. And the risk here is that the Cuban economy simply collapses and that you have severe social disorder on the island. If that happens, then we can

expect another mass migration crisis. I mean, let's face it. Thousands of migrants coming to the US is exactly not what Trump wants. Any country that can come to the rescue is welcome. And those of us who live in the United States understand that the United States is not interested in taking Cuba as another state or as a colony. They are currently negotiating but I am convinced that these negotiations will end up in a dead end because they have uh both sides have opposite uh objectives and uh eventually I am afraid that perhaps the United States will have to go into some sort of military action.

We're not looking at a US military occupation of Cuba, but there is a significant chance that there will be some sort of US military action in Cuba to crack the regime and force a regime transition. We all believe that this is our Berlin wall moment. What I've noticed while researching this story is that when Trump talks about Cuba, he says he's coming for them next, like it's some sort of future plan. But when you look at the energy crisis and what's happening inside the country, you can already see the impact of US intervention right now. History does tell us a lot about the relationship between these two countries. Like how the Cuban governments resisted US pressure for decades. But when you look at who's in the White House right now

and that Donroe vision for America, it's not clear what Trump's plan is for Cuba, whether he's even got one and how far he's willing to go. And while he figures all of that out, where does this leave Cubans? There is a genuine sense of being fed up. They watch what's going on in the world. They've seen Nicol Maduro being taken out of Venezuela. They're watching what's happening Iran. They are genuinely scared about what might happen next and is it could it turn violent and that came up quite a few times where people aren't just ignoring this and hoping it'll just go away. They are actually very scared about what might happen.