US president Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are seeking regime change in Cuba by the end of 2026. Their actions expose the hypocrisy of US policy toward Cuba over decades — claiming to champion human rights while imposing a blockade that denies Cubans access to vital resources.
Trump openly backs the return of Cuba’s old elite and has even suggested a “friendly takeover” of Cuba by the United States. After years of the US establishment blaming the island’s economic problems on socialism, incompetence, and mismanagement, Trump today openly boasts that the US embargo means “there’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything.” If Cuba really were a failed state, as Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden claim, US economic warfare would be unnecessary. This renewed aggression reveals a declining great power losing hegemony, riven by contradictions and internal crises, and desperate to crush all challenges and alternatives in order to preserve its dominance.
This January 29, Trump signed an executive order claiming that Cuba constitutes “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security and foreign policy and authorizing tariffs on goods from countries selling or providing oil to Cuba. This followed the December 2025 seizure of tankers carrying Venezuelan oil and, this January 3, the violent abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
In response to Washington’s threat of tariffs, Mexico and other countries abandoned oil shipments to Cuba. Trump’s executive order drew on several laws, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the US Supreme Court ruled on February 20 cannot be used to impose tariffs. Yet this makes little difference: Trump can use other statues to authorize the measures. In any case, no tariffs had been collected, but the threat alone had effectively stopped oil deliveries to Cuba.
Trump’s executive order had an immediate impact on the…
Auteur: Helen Yaffe
