Two ships moving through the Atlantic Ocean have caught the attention of maritime intelligence companies and geostrategists across the world. The Anatoly Kolodkin, owned by the Russian government and carrying an estimated 7,30,000 barrels of crude oil, is heading towards energy-starved Cuba in clear defiance of Donald Trump’s illegal energy blockade of the socialist island-nation. Shipping tracker firm Kpler reported that the Kolodkin could reach Cuba as early as Monday (March 23, 2026).

It would not be the first tanker attempting to bring Russian fuel to Cuba in recent weeks. The Sea Horse, loaded with 2,00,000 barrels of gas oil believed to be from Russia but owned by a Chinese firm, was headed to Cuba before it abruptly halted in the middle of the Atlantic last month — likely fearing consequences from the U.S. government. If the Russian ships arrive, defying the U.S. blockade, they will be Cuba’s first energy shipments in three months.

Even so, the relief would be temporary. The 7,30,000 barrels of crude can produce diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel, while also helping power the electric grid, Jorge Piñón, a former oil executive who studies Cuba’s energy at the University of Texas, told The New York Times. But the crude would first need to be refined, and Cuba’s refineries are highly inefficient, meaning it would likely take several weeks and waste oil in the process. The Russian shipment, Mr. Piñón said, would give Cuba “breathing room of no more than 30 days”.

The morning after Mr. Trump’s comments about “taking” Cuba earlier this week, Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, told reporters that Russia was in close contact with Cuba about its energy crisis and was “ready to provide all possible assistance.” Cuba, he added, is “an independent sovereign state that faces major economic difficulties due to the suffocating embargo imposed on the country.”

Russia’s help would be a massive succour to a desperate Cuba. The country’s entire electricity grid collapsed this week, leaving about 10 million people without power. Although the government managed to partially restore supply to parts of Havana, the consequences have been disastrous for ordinary Cubans. A report from the ground in Havana by The Guardian indicated that there are few cars on the roads, most airlines serving the island have suspended flights, the Canadian company Sherritt International has shuttered nickel mining operations in Cuba, state offices have closed, and schools have partly suspended classes. Many, the newspaper reported, are struggling with spoiled food, stifling heat, and sleepless children.

Cuba’s dependence on oil is structural: it accounts for 83% of total power generation, while oil products make up 56% of total energy consumption by industry, transport, agriculture, and households. For a country that imports roughly 80% of its food, prolonged blackouts are catastrophic as they interrupt refrigeration vital for preserving perishables. The archaic power network has been partially collapsing regularly since October 2024, with three national grid failures in the past four months alone.

None of this has deterred the Trump administration which continues to pursue criminally illegal actions. On January 29, Mr. Trump signed an executive order threatening punitive tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba. This week, he went further, explicitly threatening to “take” the island. Cuba’s fuel supplies had been highly dependent on Venezuelan oil under the oil-for-doctors scheme instituted by Hugo Chavez. In 2022, Venezuela supplied 75% of Cuba’s oil imports; by 2023, this had dropped to 58% as Mexico emerged as a key supplier with 31%. Venezuela’s supply fell from 46,500 barrels per day in December 2025 to zero following Nicolas Maduro’s abduction in early January. After the January 29 order, Mexico also halted shipments.

Six decades of coercion

The current crisis is also the culmination of six decades of U.S. economic coercion. What Cubans call the “blockade” began in 1962 following the Cuban Revolution and nationalisation of industries. The embargo was reinforced in 1992 by the Torricelli Act, which prohibited foreign subsidiaries of U.S. firms from trading with Cuba and barred ships that had docked in Cuba from entering U.S. ports for 180 days. The 1996 Helms-Burton Act codified the embargo into law, extended sanctions to foreign companies doing business in Cuba, and allowed U.S. citizens to sue foreign investors using confiscated American property. The first Trump administration redesignated Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” in January 2021, days before leaving office, deepening its financial exclusion from world trade. Cuban authorities have documented over 1,000 instances of foreign banks refusing services between 2021 and 2024.

In the second Trump administration, U.S. policy towards Cuba is fronted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who left Cuba in 1956. Mr. Rubio grew up immersed in Miami’s Cuban émigré community, where deep hostility towards the socialist government has remained a powerful force. He has openly called for regime change in Havana. “This is our hemisphere,” Mr. Rubio declared on X after the Venezuela operation.

Talks and pressure

Cuba recently admitted it was in discussions with Washington D.C. and appears willing to make some economic changes. Shortly before Mr. Trump’s latest threat, Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, the deputy Prime Minister, said Cuba was open to expatriate Cubans and foreign companies doing business on the island. “We’re not just talking about small enterprise, but also the possibility of being able to participate in key sectors of our development,” he told NBC.

But Mr. Rubio said the proposed changes did not go far enough and hinted at further pressure. “What they announced yesterday is not dramatic enough. It’s not going to fix it. So we’ve got some big decisions to make,” he said. The New York Times reported that U.S. negotiators were demanding the resignation of President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

Cuba has faced and overcome severe economic crises before. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which provided subsidies averaging $4.3 billion annually, the island went through what it termed the “Special Period” through the 1990s. GDP fell by 35% between 1989 and 1993 and Cubans faced severe food shortages. The government responded with partial liberalisation, allowing small businesses and decriminalising the circulation of U.S. dollars. More recently, it has permitted micro, small and medium enterprises. But these reforms have proved insufficient against the combined weight of the embargo and subsequent sanctions.

This crisis may be more severe still. The Special Period eventually saw Venezuela emerge as an economic lifeline under Chávez. Today, that lifeline has been severed by U.S. military action, and the executive order explicitly threatens any government contemplating humanitarian relief.

While much of the world’s attention, including India’s, has been focused on the energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — precipitated by U.S. and Israel’s illegal actions on Iran — Cuba faces a more deliberate form of strangulation. The Hormuz crisis is a consequence of regional conflict spurred by U.S. actions while Cuba’s is the intended outcome of a targeted U.S. policy designed to choke an entire nation into submission.

The Cuban government has remained defiant even as it negotiates. President Díaz-Canel responded that the U.S. government wants “to take over the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to suffocate in order to force us to surrender.” He added: “Faced with the worst-case scenario, Cuba is guided by one certainty: any external aggressor will face unyielding resistance.” Whether that resistance can outlast the blackouts and mounting desperation of ordinary Cubans and whether international support like the Russian fuel shipments will arrive in time remains to be seen.

Published – March 21, 2026 06:34 pm IST

Cuban and U.S. flags are pictured at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on March 16, 2026.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The smell of sulfur hits hard in this coastal town that produces petroleum and is home to one of Cuba’s largest thermoelectric plants. Yet, even as the plant cranks back to life, residents remain in the dark, surrounded by energy sources they cannot use.

As tensions deepen between Cuba and the U.S. after it attacked Venezuela and disrupted oil shipments, so have the woes of Santa Cruz del Norte.

People in this town east of Havana are plunged into darkness daily and forced to cook with coal and firewood, but not everyone can afford this new reality.

Kenia Montoya said she recently ripped the wooden door off her bathroom in the crumbling cinderblock home that she shares with her children because she needed firewood, and they needed to eat.

“Things are getting worse for us now,” she said. “They don’t supply us with petroleum. They don’t supply us with food. Where does that leave us, then?”

A faded purple sheet now hangs over their bathroom. Nearby, only a handful of coal remains in a small bag.

The 50-year-old mother doesn’t know how she’ll cook once the coal runs out because supplies in the region have dwindled.

It’s one of many uncertainties gripping towns like this one across Cuba after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba.

“Well, it’s a failed nation now,” Mr. Trump said this week. “And they’re not getting any money from Venezuela, and they’re not getting any money from anywhere.”

Near the main entrance to Santa Cruz del Norte, a sprawling mural is emblazoned with the following message in all caps: “NO ONE GIVES UP HERE. LONG LIVE A FREE CUBA.”

But people wonder how long they can hold out.

The island’s crisis is deepening: severe blackouts, soaring prices and a shortage of basic goods.

Meanwhile, the Cuban government remains mum over its oil reserves, offering no word on whether Russia or anyone else would increase their shipments after oil supplies from Venezuela were disrupted when the U.S. attacked and arrested its President in early January.

Cuban officials recently lauded a phone call they had with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, although they did not share details. Meanwhile, Mexico has pledged to send humanitarian aid, including food, after Trump said he asked that it suspend oil shipments to the island.

Many in Santa Cruz del Norte feel the worst is yet to come.

“With all those tariffs they’re going to impose on countries, no oil will come in, and how are we going to live?” said Gladys Delgado.

The 67-year-old had cracked open her front door on a recent chilly afternoon to get some fresh air as she sewed small, colorful rugs made of clothing scraps to make extra cash because her pension is only $6 a month.

A couple of houses down, Minorkys Hoyos dropped a handful of cassava cubes into an old pot she filled with water from a barrel and placed it over a tiny, makeshift grill inside her home.

“You live with what you have,” she said, noting she had no other food available at that moment.

The few rechargeable items that used to light her small, disheveled home have broken down, and she began to bump into things until a neighbor gifted her an improvised lantern made with fuel and a reused baby food jar.

“When it’s dark, I don’t see,” said the 53-year-old diabetic. It was late afternoon as she cooked, but her home was already dark.

Outside, two children sat on a dusty sidewalk. They stacked dominoes one atop the other to see how high they could go before the whole thing tumbled down.

For the past three months, Santa Cruz del Norte had electricity while most of Cuba was hit with constant outages stemming from aging infrastructure and fuel shortages at power plants.

People like Iván Amores were wary of rejoicing, fearful they would be plunged into the dark again like most of last year. Their fears materialized a week ago, when the outages hit again.

“This used to be wonderful,” he recalled of his town when it had electricity. “Now, it’s truly torture.”

He uses a tiny, makeshift barbecue pit to cook for himself, his daughter and young granddaughter, buying pricier coal at $3 a bag because it generates less smoke inside their tidy home.

Amores also invested in a single tube light that a Cuban man in another town builds and sells; it can be charged and even comes with a USB port.

But even those kinds of brilliant inventions Cubans are known for are out of reach for people like 67-year-old Mariela Viel; she and her husband still cannot afford to add a bathroom to their cinderblock home with a dirt floor.

Growing up, Viel said she never knew what a blackout was: “We were living well. We had food, money.” She worked more than 40 years at the cafeteria of Cuba’s power company and now receives $8 a month in pension.

“What can I afford? Nothing. Not even a package of chicken,” she said. When there’s power, she cooks rice and beans and listens to her favorite music: Cuban big bands.

Viel sat outside one recent afternoon, watching a couple neighbors walk briskly with buckets of warmed up water so their families could take showers during a cold snap that began in late January, with a record low of 32 degrees (0 degrees) recorded in a town southeast of Santa Cruz del Norte.

Celebrations also start earlier now, with one family organizing a boy’s 15th birthday — a milestone age across Latin America — mid-afternoon before he and his friends opted to finish partying outdoors under a big yellow moon.

It glowed on a group of people nearby who danced and sang outside next to a scooter blasting music from its speakers to celebrate the birthday of Olga Lilia Laurenti, now 61.

“I’m telling you, whatever’s meant to be, let it be, because we can’t stop it,” she said as she paused dancing.

“You’re not going to waste part of your life on something that’s out of your control. If only we could do something, but what are we going to do? We can’t suffer. You need laughter, you need joy.”