The lights are going out in Cuba again, but this time, the blackout is by design. With a stroke of his pen, a US president declared a "national emergency," ordered an oil blockade, and warned every shipowner and government on earth that helping an island of eleven million keep the lights on could now invite punishment from Washington.

What is unfolding in Havana is not just another tightening of a Cold War?era embargo; it is a live stress test of the emerging BRICS?centred order and its promise that small countries can survive outside the US orbit. On one side is Donald Trump, wielding tariffs, sanctions and a naval grip on the Caribbean; on the other is a battered socialist state betting its future on Russian tankers, Chinese diplomacy, Mexican defiance, and the still?nascent machinery of the New Development Bank.

Fuel siege

On 29 January 2026, Trump signed an executive order that does something the euphemism "sanctions" can no longer hide: it threatens punitive tariffs on any country or company that supplies oil to Cuba, turning the entire global fuel market into a battlefield. UN experts have called this an "extreme" form of unilateral coercion and a grave violation of international law, stressing that it has no UN Security Council mandate and is incompatible with the Charter and the basic rules of the WTO.  In plain language, Washington is asserting the right to decide who can sell fuel to Havana, and at what political price, far beyond its own borders.