The suspension of Air Canada flights to Cuba after the country warned airlines of a fuel shortage marks the newest blow for the island’s economy amid increased pressure from the Trump administration.
Cuba had been weathering economic hardship before U.S. President Donald Trump effectively cut off oil shipments to the island by blockading its chief supplier, Venezuela, and threatening tariffs on any country that stepped in to fill the void.
After the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in early January, Trump predicted Cuba’s government was “able to fall” next.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators at a hearing late last month that “we’d like to see a change” within the regime, but added the U.S. wouldn’t “make” that change.
The White House has labelled Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the U.S. as a consequence of the communist nation’s alliances with Russia, China and Iran.
Last week, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said his government is willing to enter negotiations with the Trump administration that might ease among the economic pain. Whether which means the autumn of the Cuban government is an open query.
“We could also be reaching a breaking point,” said Max Cameron, a political science professor on the University of British Columbia who studies Latin America.
Cuba has been facing fuel shortages for years, and particularly for the reason that outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA has reduced exports so as to avoid fuel scarcity at home.
Other suppliers like Russia and Mexico have also reduced oil shipments, which the Cuban government has blamed on latest U.S. sanctions imposed during Trump’s first term and later by former U.S. president Joe Biden.
The shortages have led to blackouts of the island’s fuel-powered electrical grid. In 2024, the whole population of over 10 million people was plunged into darkness when the grid ran out of fuel.
Cubans have also faced food and medicine shortages lately which have been exacerbated by hurricanes disrupting shipments of essential goods.
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Trump’s Venezuelan oil blockade, and his Jan. 29 order that countries will face tariffs in the event that they supply oil to Cuba, has further compounded the pain the country is facing.
Diaz-Canel has imposed emergency measures including shorter workweeks and college days, limited transport between provinces and fuel rationing for essential services.
“I do know we’re going to pass though difficult times. But we are going to overcome them together, with creative resilience,” he said during a rare press conference on Feb. 5 where he told residents they have to “sacrifice” and “resist.”
Mark Entwistle, who served as Canada’s ambassador to Cuba from 1993 to 1997, said Trump’s pressure campaign on Cuba also puts countries like Canada in a “vice grip.”
“The fact is that we want to administer and renegotiate (the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on free trade),” he said in an interview.
“The Canadian government … needs to administer the U.S. relationship in a smart-minded way, (but at the identical time) no one desires to see a fellow country of the Americas be bullied and crushed and potentially fall into chaos.”
Entwistle said the federal government may even need to make sure the protection and security of hundreds of Canadians in Cuba.
Global Affairs Canada says it’s aware of greater than 7,200 Canadians in Cuba and is providing consular assistance to anyone who requests it.
It also pointed to the federal government’s travel advisory for Cuba, which was upgraded Feb. 3 to warn travellers to “exercise a high degree of caution,” citing worsening power outages and shortages of basic necessities.
Canadians have long been the highest marketplace for Cuba’s lucrative tourism industry, which once generated $3 billion annually but has struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels. Many resorts have been forced to shut or reduce their bookings due to fuel and provide shortages.
Last 12 months, around 754,000 Canadians visited the island, a 12-per cent drop from the 12 months before and well below the 1.3 million pre-pandemic annual average, based on Cuba’s national statistics agency ONEI.
The number still outpaces other top markets like Russia and even Cuban nationals visiting from the U.S., and even exceeds the combined number of tourists from several other countries.
Pedro Monreal, a Cuban economist, said on X this week that Cuba’s tourism industry has develop into increasingly reliant on Canadian visitors, and that the recent drop-off has created a “pneumonia” across the sector.
The query of who’s guilty for Cuba’s economic crisis has led to finger-pointing between the Cuban government and america.
The U.S. has had an economic embargo on Cuba for the reason that early Nineteen Sixties, shortly after Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution in 1959. That embargo was codified into law within the Nineteen Nineties, and has been relaxed and strengthened at various points since then.
A period of renewed U.S.-Cuba relations under the Obama administration got here to an end when Trump took over the White House in 2017, an approach that continued under Biden.
Díaz-Canel said last week that U.S. sanctions have cost the country over $7.5 billion between March 2024 and February 2025, and called the “energy blockade” enacted by Trump a “psychological war.”
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants with deep ties to Miami’s Cuban community, told the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee on Jan. 28 that Cuba’s economic problems are the fault of the federal government’s many years of mismanagement.
“The suffering in the agricultural areas of Cuba are acute they usually’re deep, and it’s not due to embargo. It’s because they don’t know the best way to run an economy,” he said.
“How is it the fault of the U.S. embargo that Cuba, one in all the world’s largest sugar producers, now imports sugar? Because no sector of their society works. It’s frozen and it’s broken.”
Entwistle and Cameron said either side are partially chargeable for the present situation. They said Cuba’s investments in health care and social services, while laudable, got here on the expense of infrastructure that has been failing for many years.
The U.S. embargo, meanwhile, has blocked foreign investment and made sourcing goods difficult, though countries unfriendly to the U.S. like Russia, China and Venezuela have often stepped in to assist.
The embargo has also, within the eyes of many experts and researchers, aimed to impress regime change and force Cuba away from communism.
Although Entwistle said Cubans are “exhausted” by the worsening economic crisis and “would like to see a change in government,” he added the pressure from the U.S. is fueling Cuban nationalism and “anti-Americanism.”
“If there may be a view in Washington that each one Cubans on the island are waiting for them to come back, or that Cubans will endure all suffering in order that there generally is a change in government — suffering even provoked by the U.S. government itself — that’s an incorrect assessment,” he said.
Cameron added that a fall of the regime in Cuba could spark an influence vacuum and civil strife which will create a brand new security crisis for the U.S. and the broader region.
“You don’t need to turn Cuba into one other Haiti,” he said.