The Blockade Stays: Trump, Cuba, and the Siege

Trump reversed the Cuba SSOT deal on inauguration day. 150 freed prisoners. A grid in collapse. A blockade by design.

On January 20, 2025 — his first day in office — Donald Trump reversed the only meaningful easing of US pressure on Cuba in years. Six days earlier, Biden had removed Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism as part of a Vatican-brokered deal: Cuba would release 553 political prisoners, including many arrested after the 2021 protests; the US would lift the designation that, since 2021, had layered additional financial restrictions onto an already comprehensive six-decade embargo. Cuba began releasing prisoners immediately. By January 20, roughly 150 had been freed. Trump reversed the designation the same day he was inaugurated, and the prisoner releases stopped.

This is where Cuba stands as the second Trump administration begins: under maximum economic pressure, in the middle of its deepest crisis since the Special Period of the 1990s, with the last diplomatic off-ramp closed before it fully opened.

The Material Conditions

The material conditions on the island are not in dispute. Cuba’s economy contracted for the third consecutive year in 2024, with GDP more than 10% below its 2018 level. The national electrical grid collapsed completely in October 2024, and rolling blackouts of 20 hours or more have persisted across provinces since. Sugar production — once the backbone of the export economy — fell below 200,000 metric tons in 2025, the lowest output in over two centuries. Cuba requested food aid from the UN World Food Programme in March 2024; the programme was already supporting 760,000 people on the island before that request. The informal exchange rate for the US dollar stands at 450 pesos against an official rate of 24, a disparity that makes any import-dependent sector functionally insolvent.

Since 2020, an estimated 2.75 million Cubans have emigrated — roughly a quarter of the population. This is not a trickle. It is a demographic rupture. The number of family doctors on the island has been nearly halved. Professional sectors across education, sports, and culture are emptying. A country that built its international reputation partly on human development indicators — literacy, infant mortality, medical capacity — is watching those indicators erode in real time.

The causes are multiple and the Cuban government’s own management decisions bear some of the responsibility — overly centralized production, insufficient private sector liberalization, the military conglomerate GAESA’s dominance of tourism and retail while state services collapse. These are not Western talking points; they are the conclusions of Cuban and Latin American economists analyzing the structural roots of the crisis. A materialist analysis applies the same evidentiary standard to state socialist economies that it applies to capitalist ones: the test is what happens to people’s material lives.

What also happens to people’s material lives, measurably and documentably, is this: the US State Sponsors of Terrorism designation does not just restrict US trade. It functions as a secondary sanction mechanism, deterring third-country banks and companies from any financial relationship with Cuba for fear of US regulatory action. The SSOT designation means that international shipping companies face financing difficulties, that fuel suppliers face banking complications, and that the energy crisis — which is fundamentally a fuel supply problem — is made materially worse by the difficulty of paying for oil through any institution with US dollar exposure. UN human rights experts said so directly when Trump re-imposed the designation, calling it a “regressive step” with devastating impact on vulnerable populations.

The Political Purpose of the Designation

The political purpose of the SSOT designation is not counter-terrorism. Cuba’s justification for the label rests on harboring ELN leaders involved in a 2019 Bogotá bombing and refusing to extradite several US fugitives, some of whom have lived on the island for over fifty years. By the same evidentiary standard, the United States harbored Luis Posada Carriles — the CIA-linked Cuban exile who planned the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, killing 73 people — and refused Venezuela’s extradition requests for decades until his death in 2018. The designation is not a legal finding. It is a policy instrument, and its effect is to make Cuba’s economic recovery structurally impossible without US permission — which is the point.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and the architect of Cuba policy in the Trump second term, has been explicit about this logic. Cuba is “literally collapsing,” he said at his confirmation hearing, attributing this collapse to the Cuban government’s failures. What he did not say — because the logic does not require saying — is that US policy is specifically designed to deepen that collapse, on the theory that sufficient economic pressure will produce regime change. This has been the operating theory of US Cuba policy for sixty-three years. The regime has not changed. The people have endured.

Options, Allies, and the Limits of External Support

Cuba’s government is not without options or allies. China and Russia have strategic interests in maintaining a foothold ninety miles from Florida, and both have provided economic support — oil, credit lines, limited investment — that has partially offset US pressure. Al Jazeera’s reporting on Cuba’s 2026 fuel crisis documents how Venezuela’s own crisis has throttled the subsidized oil shipments that were Cuba’s primary energy lifeline after the Soviet collapse. The structural vulnerability is real: Cuba built its post-Soviet model on preferential external relationships — Venezuelan oil, medical service exports, tourism — and each of those pillars has weakened simultaneously.

Whether Cuba can develop a more self-sustaining economic model while under active siege is an open question. What is not open is who designed the siege conditions. The blockade is not a neutral economic fact. It is a deliberate policy of collective economic punishment applied to eleven million people, maintained across twelve US presidential administrations, re-tightened every time a diplomatic opening appears, and justified by a counter-terrorism framework that would not survive two minutes of evenhanded scrutiny.

The prisoner deal that Biden’s last-minute move enabled — and Trump’s first-day reversal destroyed — was not a gift to the Cuban government. It was a concrete transaction: freedom for people who had been sentenced to decades in prison for participating in protests. One hundred and fifty of them were freed in the six days the deal existed. Trump closed that window on inauguration day. That is the current state of US Cuba policy: not strategic competition, not counter-terrorism, but the systematic sabotage of any path that does not run through Washington.

For more on how the US uses exile communities as instruments of foreign policy against Cuba and other targeted states, see Weaponized Diaspora. On the selective human rights framework that underpins these pressure campaigns, see NATO Expansion and Ukraine: Who Actually Benefits.

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