Why Cuba is Back in the Crosshairs

With Venezuela effectively neutralized as a regional adversary, Cuba has re-emerged as the next unresolved target of U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere. For the Trump administration, it represents an unfinished historical problem: a surviving challenge to U.S. hemispheric authority 90 miles from Florida. In response to the U.S. military operation that captured Nicolás Maduro in early January, President Trump publicly vowed to cut off Venezuelan oil and financial support to Cuba and warned Havana to “make a deal … before it is too late,” intensifying pressure on an already fragile economy.

This sequencing matters. Venezuela’s oil revenues, financial channels, and governing elite were systematically targeted until the state’s ability to function independently was sharply curtailed. Cuba now faces a comparable strategy, adapted to its scale and vulnerabilities. Unlike Venezuela, the island lacks significant commodity rents and has long depended on external arrangements to stabilize scarcity. That dependence makes the present moment especially dangerous.

Cuba’s current vulnerability distinguishes this phase of confrontation from earlier cycles of pressure. The island is experiencing its deepest economic crisis in decades. Inflation has remained persistently high, eroding purchasing power and pricing basic necessities out of reach. Tourism revenue and hard-currency inflows have collapsed, and daily power blackouts are now widespread due to fuel shortages and an aging electrical grid. It’s not just that economic growth that has stopped. Cuba has lost the fragile equilibrium that once allowed the state to manage scarcity without either prosperity or mass unrest.

The Energy Shock and Its Aftermath

For years, Venezuela underwrote Cuba’s energy system. At its peak, Havana imported roughly 50,000-55,000 barrels per dayof subsidized Venezuelan crude against a total national requirement of about 110,000 barrels per day. Because these supplies exceeded immediate domestic refining needs, Cuba was able to re-export part of the oil. This arrangement—often overlooked in public debate—functioned as a critical stabilizer of the balance of payments, exchanged for medical services, intelligence cooperation, and political alignment.

This system did not make Cuba prosperous, but it made chronic crisis manageable. Energy arbitrage helped finance imports, stabilize the peso, and smooth supply chains in ways that domestic production could not. With the effective decapitation of the Maduro regime and the blocking of Venezuelan oil flows, that lifeline has been abruptly severed. Mexico’s limited assistance, at roughly 20,000 barrels per day, is insufficient to bridge the gap. The result has been cascading blackouts that now dominate everyday life, paralyzing transport, manufacturing, and distribution networks.

Cuba’s remaining energy channels are narrow and easily disrupted. This makes further isolation relatively low-cost for Washington but economically devastating for an island whose limited surplus capacities long depended on external energy arrangements rather than sovereign control.

Pressure Without Revolt

Despite the scale of collapse, economic pressure has not produced rebellion. Fear of chaos, violence, and post-collapse retribution has reinforced elite cohesion and social passivity. Memories of disorder following state collapse elsewhere in the post-socialist world have encouraged caution rather than mobilization. Pressure hardens the state rather than fracturing it.

What pressure does produce is migration. Cubans leave instead of rising up. Since 2021, hundreds of thousands have exited the island, many via third countries and irregular routes toward the United States. This movement is not an ideological plebiscite but a rational response to declining material conditions, infrastructure failure, and blocked prospects for recovery.

Once migration reaches the U.S. border, however, causality is erased. Economic suffering shaped by sanctions, energy disruption, and structural dependency is reinterpreted as evidence of people “fleeing communism.” Migration becomes proof rather than consequence—and proof becomes mandate. Hardship justifies pressure, pressure generates migration, and migration legitimizes further restriction.

Memory, Exile Politics, and U.S. Power

Since the 1959 Revolution, Cuba has occupied a singular place in the American political imagination. The overthrow of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship and the island’s rapid alignment with the Soviet Union constituted not merely the emergence of an adversarial state, but a permanent affront to U.S. hemispheric authority. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and decades of embargo, covert action, and diplomatic isolation fixed Cuba as a Cold War problem whose symbolic charge long outlived its strategic meaning.

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s survival remained for many in Washington an unresolved anomaly. The brief normalization process under Barack Obama mattered precisely because it broke with this logic by treating Cuba as a normal state rather than a historical aberration. Its reversal during Trump’s first term—and now under Secretary of State Marco Rubio—has restored a Cuba policy organized around memory rather than management.

That politics of memory has long been mediated by the Cuban-American exile community, particularly in Miami, where anticommunism hardened into a disciplined ideological regime with electoral, financial, and institutional reach. Rubio’s political trajectory exemplifies this structure. His rhetoric is not empirical but eschatological: capitalism is always imminent, Cuba always on the brink, and history perpetually demanding redemption. Trump’s governing style—marked by indifference to norms, preference for spectacle, and impatience with constraint—has supplied the executive temperament for translating this worldview into policy.

Invoking Theory: Economics as Authority

Within this political ecosystem, selected strands of immigration economics have been elevated from academic debate to political justification. As John Maynard Keynes once warned, “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” His point was not that economic ideas endure, but that when they are severed from the intellectual and institutional contexts that produced them, they acquire a dangerous autonomy—migrating from argument into authority.

George J. Borjas’s reanalysis of the Mariel boatlift illustrates this process. Borjas argued that the sudden influx of Cuban workers in 1980 depressed wages among less-educated workers in Miami, a claim advanced decades after David Card’s original finding of no significant wage effects. The results were immediately contested. Subsequent re-evaluations using broader labor market definitions and synthetic control methods found no statistically significant wage effects once sampling choices were relaxed. Large-scale reviews of the immigration literature conclude that long-run aggregate wage effects are generally small and often positive once productivity gains and complementarities are accounted for. Even Borjas himself has acknowledged the sensitivity of his findings to underlying assumptions.

Yet once translated into political discourse, nuance disappears. Immigration restriction ceases to appear as a policy choice with trade-offs and instead becomes an apparent necessity. Per Keynes’s formulation, Borjas here is the archetypal “defunct economist”: not absent, but abstracted, cited without context, and transformed into legitimizing moral authority. Cuban suffering produces migration; migration is framed as economic threat; restriction becomes imperative; and restriction reinforces the very pressures that generate displacement.

Migration as Mandate

What binds Miami exile politics, selective immigration economics, and Cuba’s present crisis is a single political circuit. Anticommunism supplies the moral script, technocratic economics supplies the alibi, and executive power supplies the coercive capacity. Pressure produces migration; migration legitimizes restriction; and restriction, in turn, authorizes further pressure. Cuba’s deterioration becomes not a failure of policy but its justification.

Here humanitarian language completes the circuit. Sanctions sound punitive, embargoes aggressive, but “humanitarian corridors,” “stabilization,” and “protection” sound reluctant and moral. Migration supplies urgency, humanitarianism supplies legitimacy, and coercion enters without naming itself. What begins as economic pressure is redefined as obligation.

This matters because the Trump administration has demonstrated a readiness to frame coercive escalation as humanitarian necessity. Measures such as asset seizures, extraterritorial sanctions enforcement, and the public airing of military options have been justified not as deliberate instruments of pressure but as reluctant responses to collapse. Cuba’s location ensures that any forced migration resulting from state collapse would move rapidly and overwhelmingly toward the United States, colliding with a Trump administration that has defined itself through migration restriction, mass enforcement, and the expansion of ICE authority. What would be framed as a humanitarian emergency abroad would thus be managed as a security threat at home. The same pressures used to justify intervention would be used to legitimize detention, interdiction, and exclusion.

If pressure tips into invasion or externally induced regime collapse, the likely outcome is not democratic transition but institutional disintegration. Cuba’s state structures—however repressive and inefficient—still organize food distribution, healthcare, energy allocation, and internal order. Their sudden removal would risk a humanitarian crisis on a far larger scale than the current one, including mass displacement, breakdown of basic services, and violent competition over scarce resources. For the United States, this would mean not only moral responsibility but a migration shock far greater than the one now used to justify escalation.

Cuba is thus governed not as a real and complex society with adaptive constraints but as a symbolic problem demanding resolution. Its suffering is converted into proof, and proof into mandate. What is presented as inevitability is, in fact, the result of a tightly closed political loop—one that threatens to produce consequences that neither Washington nor the Cuban people are prepared to contain.

This first appeared on FPIF.

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