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What we're doing to the Cuban people with this blockade is criminal. I don't expect to see justice in my lifetime. What a miserable state of affairs.
Thank you for being one of the few that seem to actually understand that this is not just a embargo but an actual full-fledged blockade

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/02/un-experts-c...

This is collective punishment and considered a war crime under Fourth Geneva Convention

Cuba is a Criminal state, the smart ones already left for America several times, 10% of the population in 2022-2023.

So many false tears shed for doing a 100th of what the Cuban government has done to it's own people. Iran, the Houthies, Cuba in the 60s etc none of them believed in free trade, infact they expropriated billions in American owned assets.

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The US is not enforcing a blockade, it's an embargo. The US and other countries are refusing to trade with Cuba, but plenty of other countries can and do trade with Cuba. Cuba is not entitled to trade with the US.

A blockade is when a country stops traffic, from entering a country's ports. It's an act of war, and a totally different thing from an embargo.

Cuba went through something similar in 1991:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period

Cuba has received shipments of oil and humanitarian goods from Mexico and Russia just this year, and I don't believe that the US has done anything to stop that (although the US has heavily sanctioned Russia in general for years now). However, those good received this year appear to have been free of charge.

I'm wondering if the US is solely to blame for Cuba being completely unable to pay for the oil it needs. Obviously the US embargo on Cuba is devastating for its economy, but other states impacted by US sanctions in a similar manner seem to get by with essential good like food, oil, and medicine. Cuba is in a poor economic spot, but the US does not appear at all to be using its military to prevent them from trade with other nations.

Isn’t Cuba prime estate for solar, maybe wind too? A little gift from China could go a long way.
38% of it's electricity comes from solar. They've been ahead of the curve for a long time. But solar alone is not enough to meet energy security on an island nation
It's not like one needs to say blames here, as if it's just an accusation and there could be another cause for that.

We also have no reason to doubt that Cuba has run out of fuel as a result of an embargo on fuel when the officials say so. It's not a surprise; it was the expected outcome and the entire point of the embargo.

A better title would be: "Cuba jas run out of fuel due to the US embargo".

>It's not like one needs to say blames here, as if it's just an accusation and there could be another cause for that

The US started the Oil Embargo and AFAIK it is still on-goimg. Cuba is running out of fuel. To me 2+2=4, so I say blame can be placed on the US :)

functionally the same - and more accurate to use the original title, as Cuba is the one doing the blaming. I don't know why you're standing up for this - it's more bad behavior from a country that sells itself as the savior, and it's not new - they've been doing this (whatever they need to, to change regimes) in other countries for decades. It's shameless bullying, and completely contravenes "the rules" about how to interact with other countries.
Either way, no bueno.
The current advancement of technology and warfare has opened up fascinating opportunities for powerful nations (USA). For example, given the extremely sophisticated targeting capacities of Palantir, how out of realm would taking out the entire Castro family be? I'm not talking about the morality, but simply the military options now available to the President.
From the perspective of a layman, isn't this bullying? Don't we suppose to have the UN where nations.. unite?
The UN was designed to not bind the powerful nations. That's the point of the security council.

Granted, little weird Russia kept a seat when the USSR broke up.

Sure, they will work hard to be a real place for mediation between small countries and unimportant parties, but they will veto anything against their interests.

No, refusing to trade with an adversary nation isn't bullying.
The chinesse should just supply them with a shitload of wind turbines and solar panels. Syphillitic Mumm-ra is deathly afraid of those so he's likely to leave them alone.
I don't really understand the point of the embargo. I am an American.

Picking on a tiny country like Cuba serves no purpose. The elites in Cuba are not going to suffer; the normal people will.

Instead of acting like a bully, I wish our government would be more magnanimous and just drop the embargo.

> I don't really understand the point of the embargo.

Making sure Florida's Cuban-American community keeps voting Republican.

The end result is going to be them being another China-dependent colony. https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/as-the-us-starves-it-of...

There's a sizable Cuban-American community that hates the regimes and wants to use the USA to overthrow it, and they're a swing voting bloc in Florida which has a lot of electoral votes. That's the point.

Deciding the Cold War is over, other countries get to decide their own political affairs, and normalizing trade with Cuba would benefit Americans.

That's also a minor gripe I have with the leftists who call this imperialism. Let's say it is. And it's benefiting me how? I thought imperialism was supposed to benefit the empire doing the imperialism-ing. (At least in theory.) This is costing us tons of money and international prestige.

(Not saying I support that kind of imperialism either, just making the point that this is lose-lose.)

And, for an encore - stop all the other stupid shit. The rest of the world (and the US) is paying the price for little trump-tantrums, like the one against Iran. He's not a good international leader. He's not even a reasonable at-home president.
As a nation, we're still pissed off that those uppity dark skinned people (/s) overthrew our businesses and replaced the corrupt politicians installed by our government/businesses. Generally, when other nations do that, we invade them. Repeating that pattern in Central America led to coining the phrase "banana republic" to describe it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

Also, we're still pissed off at Iran for deposing (in 1979) the dictator that we installed in 1953.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

Whenever America acts "funny" (or irrationally, if you prefer) and does something politically/militarily that makes no sense to the average person, the answer is almost always "white supremacy". In the past, that could be waved away by mumbling "we're fighting communism", but after the collapse of the Soviet Union & Warsaw Pact, we needed a new excuse. Sometimes "fighting terrorism" is used instead, but the T-word never gets applied to white people.

A political tactician would call it a Wedge Issue.

A human would call it generational depravity of the powerful.

They embarrassed us years ago by forcing out US capitalists exploiting them and sided with Russia during the Cold War. We won’t forgive them for 50,000 years now despite we work fine with Japan and Germany
can't have communists in the western hemisphere. They give up authoritarian communism, we will be magnanimous.
The US has had an embargo on Cuba for a long time that exempted Food and Medicine, while other countries freely traded with Cuba.

However, under the Trump admin it has turned into a de-facto blockade of all fuel, which really isn't the embargo, it's a new blockade by the US against Cuba. So I don't get why we blame it on the embargo when the current problems are clearly caused by the blockade.

Cuba's previous economic problems are driven by a complete lack of economic reforms, as unnamed Chinese officials said in this FT article two years ago:

https://www.ft.com/content/9ca0a495-d5d9-4cc5-acf5-43f42a912...

  "China publicly supports Cuba’s right to choose its own path to economic development “in line with its national conditions”, but privately Chinese officials have long urged the Cuban leadership to shift from its vertically planned economy to something closer to the Chinese model, according to economists and diplomats briefed on the situation.

  Chinese officials have been perplexed and frustrated at the Cuban leadership’s unwillingness to decisively implement a market-oriented reform programme despite the glaring dysfunction of the status quo, the people said."
I agree what the US is doing is horrible, but Cuba is not blameless on their overall situation
Other countries are in a Catch-22 situation regarding Cuba - for example in Canada, Canadian law penalizes companies that refuse to trade with Cuba in order to comply with U.S. sanctions, and U.S. law can penalize them if they do trade.
Yeah it's crazy when the CCP expresses frustration that you're not doing more capitalism...

As an aside, I'm surprised that computers wouldn't make centralized economies more doable. It might not be good but at least the people wouldn't be starving and dying because hospitals are out of electricity.

but what has changed right now in this particular situation, is the fact that they are blockaded since January.
I have no opinions on this matter, but what I do know is that most of the comments here deeply misunderstand the situation
What the US is doing to Cuba and has been doing to it for the past 70 years is a horrible crime.

What a lack of confidence in their own system to not allow fair competition between Cuban socialism and American capitalism.

It feels similar to Putin invading Ukraine because he didn't like the example of an EU-aligned country prospering next door and the populace starting to ask difficult questions.

I can agree that the current de facto blockade of oil is an unwarranted act of aggression and that the embargo was bad policy but the embargo was hardly criminal. The premise of the embargo was that Cuba expropriated American property without compensation so congress was punishing the Cuban government in turn. Again, its bad policy but not really unusual or criminal per se. The embargo has also had a ton of carve out since the end of the Cold War and the US is the main supplier of agricultural good to Cuba. The Cuban government has also engaged in a lot of bad behavior over the decades that warrants some sort of international sanction. They fueled the Angolan Civil War and made the broader conflict far worse (it was sort of their Vietnam). They prop up the worst security states around Latin America, like SEBIN in Venezuela until very recently. They were also involved in helping rig elections and suppress dissent in a number of Latin American countries.

> It feels similar to Putin invading Ukraine because he didn't like the example of an EU-aligned country prospering next door and the populace starting to ask difficult questions.

This is a misreading of Putin's motivation IMHO. He states clearly over and over again that it's about a historical concept of greater and historic Russia. He has even stated publicly it has nothing to do with NATO. So this is a false equivalence.

>It feels similar to Putin invading Ukraine because he didn't like the example of an EU-aligned country prospering next door and the populace starting to ask difficult questions.

Ukraine was a much poorer state and is a much poorer state than Russia. Putin's invasion has nothing to do with "EU-aligning prosperity" that never happened, but with USA and EU overthrowing Ukrainian government and placing a puppet regime that turned Ukraine from a friendly-to-neutral state into an hostile one to Russia.

Here are some facts about Cuba and oil. The Cuban government was getting free oil from Venezuella. That ended on Jan. 3rd. Cuba was taking that oil, and reselling most of it on the open oil market. Cuba also has their own oil wells, so they can produce oil if they need it. Cuba was also having power outages prior to Jan 3rd.

Cuba also used to have the best economony in the Caribbean prior to 1959 when the Castro's took over. They switched from a free market ecomony to a state run socialist economy.

The embargo on Cuba is unbelievably silly in 2026:

- The Cold War is over and Cuba poses no security risk - Florida is no longer a swing state and appeasing Cuban Americans is not a worthwhile political move - We are willing to ally with much more oppressive regimes for less geopolitical benefits - Cuba was in the process of liberalizing and developing an independent middle class for the first time in half a century before Trump's last crackdown.

The jury is out on whether the "regime change" (or more like, junior dictator promotion) in Venezuela was worthwhile. It's certainly looking like a quagmire in Iran.

By hardballing GAESA, we're probably shooting ourselves in the foot by making the Cuban population more resentful of the US. "Regime change" is a less likely positive outcome than it was 8 years ago.

But we have plenty of models of military dictatorships slowly opening up to becoming stable economies through trade and access. More or less that's what happened with Vietnam, to name one.

My impression is that while the final outcome is yet to be seen, Syria's current administration is a decent example of a government that one would naively expect to be fairly regressive recognizing the power and prosperity granted by liberalization.
The humanitarian impact of this embargo is just one of the many stains on the USA that can never be removed.
The US starves anyone it does not like from natural resources and subsequently makes them buy US natural resources. It has done this to the EU, now it is trying to do it to China and Cuba.

This way they can control everyone.

This is the exact opposite of what the US is doing to Cuba: The US isn't making Cuba by US resources, it's prohibiting Cuba from buying US resources and products.
The US is explicitly not letting Cuba buy US goods, that's literally the only thing it's doing.
It's so funny how much anti-americans cry about the US refusing to sell things to an adversary.
There is a point where you are so weak, and your opponent is strong, that the best outcome for everyone on the whole is for you to just capitulate. Surrender.

I don't know if there is something I am missing, but to me, the "bad guy" in a situation like this is the one holding onto power at everyone else's (extreme) expense, throwing their own team into the fire to keep their power in place as long as possible.