Trump Sanctions on Cuba's Oil Company Expected to Worsen Humanitarian Crisis
"The US regime's secretary of state, driven by ambitions of conquest, presidential aspirations, and the vengeful sentiments of the elitist clique that propelled his political career, now further tightens the economic and energy stranglehold against Cuba," said the island's foreign minister.
Amid mounting global calls for President Donald Trump to end his administration's "economic genocide" in Cuba, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday announced sanctions against the state-owned oil and gas company, a move expected to worsen the island's fuel shortage and related humanitarian crisis.
Trump, in recent months, has repeatedly threatened to "take" Cuba and ramped up the 65-year US embargo against the country, including by imposing an oil blockade—disrupting food supplies, healthcare, education, transportation, and more—and issuing a May executive order that Rubio cited in his statement about the sanctions against Union Cuba-Petroleo (CUPET).
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a longtime advocate of regime change on the island, claimed Thursday "that like every resource on the island, energy has long been weaponized by Cuba's communist government as a tool of both repression and self-serving regime kleptocracy."
"While the Cuban people have suffered fuel shortages and blackouts because of decades of under-investment in critical infrastructure," Rubio continued, "Cuba's communist leaders have diverted energy resources to line their own pockets: reselling countless barrels of scarce energy on the secondary market, hoarding energy supplies for its military, intelligence, and repressive forces, and rationing energy as a tool of social control."
Warning of the new sanctions' likely impact, William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University in the United States, told The Associated Press: "It appears that they're all in on strangling the Cuban economy... Their policy is a contradiction. They claim they don't want to create a humanitarian crisis, although that's exactly what they’re doing."
As some Florida Republicans in Congress celebrated the secretary of state's announcement, Cuban officials fired back, with Bruno Rodríguez, Cuba's foreign affairs minister, taking aim at Rubio in a social media post.
"The US regime's secretary of state, driven by ambitions of conquest, presidential aspirations, and the vengeful sentiments of the elitist clique that propelled his political career, now further tightens the economic and energy stranglehold against Cuba," he wrote in Spanish. "To justify it, he does not resort to excuses prepared by his State Department, but to the usual crude lies, the most aggressive, uncouth, and rabid among Cuba's enemies."
Ernesto Soberón, Cuba's permanent representative to the United Nations, accused Rubio of "peddling crude lies" while the US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, "mindlessly parrots the claim that the blockade does not exist and is, therefore, not primarily responsible for the suffering of the Cuban people."
"The cynicism of top US officials knows no bounds," Soberón said. "Stop the collective punishment of the Cuban people."
This week alone, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and thousands of Italian medical professionals have spoken out against the US blockade of Cuba.
“The fuel restrictions imposed since early 2026 and recent tightening of extraterritorial sanctions, taken together, are directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable," said Türk. "Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines. This is unacceptable. These sanctions must be lifted immediately."
The Trump administration's targeting of CUPET came a week after it sanctioned Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, his wife, and three other individuals.
"We just want them to be a nicely run country," Trump told journalists in the Oval Office last week, when asked whether those sanctions were meant to accelerate Cuba's collapse. "The country is starving, and it's got no energy, it's got no oil, it's got no money, it's got nothing. It's got a beautiful piece of land. You could have beautiful resorts."
Trump said that Cuba had already "sort of collapsed" and "we're going to handle that as soon as we've finished" military operations in Iran. He added, "I like to do one thing at a time."
Earlier this week, Elena Gutiérrez, a Mexican American activist at Global Exchange, wrote for Foreign Policy In Focus about returning from three trips to the island this year "with my heart a little more broken, but also with a stronger conviction that we need to defend Cuba."
"But can US citizens truly stop the madness their own empire imposes on them and on the rest of the world? Let us hope so, because only the people of the United States—and no one else—can carry out the transformations their own country needs," according to Gutiérrez. "Only then will Cuba, the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world be free."
