US President Donald Trump has hinted that Cuba could become his next target, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has for years linked the overthrow of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela to Cuba's liberation from communism. The BBC analyzes what awaits the "island of freedom" in the new era of American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
The end of oil — the end of Cuba?
"Cuba is ready to fall. Now Cuba has no income. All their income came from Venezuela, from Venezuelan oil. They no longer receive anything. Cuba is literally on the brink of collapse," Trump said last week.
In response, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said his country had been under pressure from the United States for 66 years and that its people were ready to "defend the homeland to the last drop of blood."
"Cuba is a free, independent and sovereign country. Nobody dictates to us what to do," Diaz-Canel said in response to Trump's threats.
Venezuela was Cuba's main oil supplier, but exports were cut off a month ago due to a US naval blockade of Venezuela. The last oil tanker sailed for Cuba in mid-December, Reuters reported, citing internal PDVSA documents. Venezuela's state-owned oil and gas company.
Fuel shortages have been hitting the Cuban economy hard for several years. In recent years, the island has been plagued by frequent power and internet outages, as well as acute shortages of basic goods. A Cuban demographer estimates that the country's population has shrunk by 18% due to emigration, with mostly young people leaving.
It is unclear whether other countries will be able to replace Venezuelan supplies. "Reuters" reported that a tanker carrying Mexican oil arrived in Havana on Friday. However, Mexico's share of Cuban oil imports remains small and has even declined over the past year under pressure from the Trump administration, according to calculations by researchers who track tanker movements. Cuba does not publish official figures on oil imports.
In theory, Cuba could try to negotiate supplies from other friendly countries in the region, such as Brazil and Colombia, where leftist leaders are in power, said Paul Webster Hare, a senior lecturer in international relations at Boston University and a former British ambassador to Cuba.
"The system is not on the verge of collapse. Yes, Cuba is in an extremely difficult economic situation, but the situation is not critical," notes the leading British expert on Cuba, Stephen Wilkinson, a senior lecturer at the University of Buckingham.
According to him, Cubans are used to living in conditions of huge deficits, and although the fuel shortage has weakened the defense capabilities of the Cuban army, any attempt at invasion would meet massive resistance from the population.
In addition, despite Trump's claims, Cuba has other sources of income besides the resale of Venezuelan oil — First of all, tourism, the export of medical services, as well as natural resources such as nickel, whose importance is growing due to its use in data centers and hardware related to artificial intelligence.
Regime change or split of the elites?
In addition to being a source of cheap oil, socialist Venezuela was also Cuba's closest ideological ally. After the collapse of the USSR, the island lost its main sponsor and went through hard times, but in 1999, socialist Hugo Chavez came to power in Caracas, who soon formed an alliance with Fidel Castro.
In exchange for cheap oil, Cuba sent doctors to Venezuela, and Chavez himself spent the last months of his life in Cuban hospitals. The creation of a quality mass healthcare system was one of the political priorities of the Cuban revolutionaries, supported at the time by the Soviet Union.
"The "oil for doctors" program allowed Chávez to deliver the social benefits promised to the impoverished majority in Venezuela - the backbone of his Bolivarian revolution - and became a catalyst for Cuba's recovery from the economic crisis of the "special period" that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc," writes Helen Yaffe, a professor at the University of Glasgow. "This exchange turned medical services into a major source of income for Cuba, allowed it to circumvent the long-standing US blockade and gave Cubans a breather from the power blackouts and long bus queues caused by the oil shortage."
The alliance survived the deaths of both Castro and Chavez, who was succeeded by Nicolas Maduro, who had close ties to the Cuban nomenclature. As his domestic support waned, Maduro increasingly relied on the Cuban security services. The killing of 32 Cuban bodyguards during an attempt to capture Maduro was a clear example of this relationship.
If Cuban communism survived the collapse of the USSR, it can survive the fall of Venezuela, says former British ambassador Paul Webster Hurr. According to him, the authorities in Havana see other leaders finding common ground with Trump through dialogue, flattery and promises of mutual benefit. There is nothing stopping the Cuban leadership from trying such a deal, especially since diplomatic relations between the two countries have been preserved and were restored during the administration of Barack Obama in the United States and Raul Castro in Cuba, notes Herr.
In 2017, during his first term, Trump ended the so-called "Cuban Thaw" and surrounded himself with supporters of regime change in Cuba. In his first administration, the national security adviser was John Bolton, who accused Cuba of developing biological weapons without evidence. In Trump's second administration, Marco Rubio became Secretary of State - the son of Cuban immigrants, whose political career was largely built on the promise to liberate his parents' native island from communism.
"For Marco Rubio, the future of Cuba is a much more personal matter than the future of Venezuela. But he may no longer be so sure that Trump's agenda suits him," says Herr.
So far, American intervention in Venezuela has been limited to capturing Maduro. While more than a dozen other defendants in his criminal case, including Venezuela's current defense minister, remain at large in Caracas.
Trump is willing to work with the new acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, a former vice president in Maduro's administration. Rodriguez is the daughter of a Marxist guerrilla, but Rubio is forced to work with her rather than his ally — opposition leader Maria Machado, who failed to win Trump's support.
And if even in Venezuela, where opposition political parties still exist, there is no talk of regime change for now, it is even more difficult to imagine a similar scenario in Cuba, where for more than 60 years only one party has been allowed - the communist one.
"There is no alternative force in Cuba that could take power", notes Wilkinson of the University of Buckingham. "From my experience and my many years of observation of Cuba, I would say that the Cuban leadership is extremely cohesive."
At the moment, Cuba's leadership is not ready to abandon the one-party system and the socialist model, adds Hurr of Boston University. However, this does not mean that there are no potential reformers within the Communist Party, similar to Mikhail Gorbachev: "Someone new may emerge. Most people in Miami and the Cuban-American community consider the most likely scenario to be one in which a figure from the Communist Party or the military proclaims himself a reformist-technocrat."