The US Blockade of Oil Shipments to Cuba: GIGA Expert Bert Hoffmann Warns of Humanitarian Crisis

How drastic is the crisis in Cuba? How is it affecting everyday life? Bert Hoffmann: Everything is affected. Cuba is entering a state of emergency. There are power cuts every day for hours on end. Charcoal is being sold on the streets because many people have no more gas to cook with. The worst bottleneck is in petrol and diesel, as the island is 100 per cent dependent on imports for fuel and the United States is blocking all fuel shipments into the country. Oil reserves will soon run dry. And without diesel for the trucks, no more food can be brought from the countryside to the urban areas, and hospitals won’t receive oxygen deliveries. People will die. How did it come to such dramatic scarcity? Bert Hoffmann: Cuba imported 70 per cent of its oil from Venezuela. The United States has blocked every shipment to Cuba since the US military action against the Venezuelan president Maduro on 3 January. The United States has subsequently put so much pressure on Mexico that it was forced to cancel oil shipments to Cuba that were already planned. Trump has also started threatening any country that ships oil to Cuba with punitive tariffs. Trump, Rubio, and co. are even publicly celebrating having found the pressure point to bring socialist Cuba to its knees 67 years after Fidel Castro’s revolution. Might Russia enter the fray as an ideological ally? Bert Hoffmann: Theoretically, it could. In practice, though, it seems unlikely that Russia would enter into open conflict with the United States over Cuba. Moscow denounced the US blockade and said it would ship oil to Cuba. So far, it’s remained pure rhetoric – there are no plans to ship any oil. On the contrary, due to Cuba’s airports lacking kerosine to fuel their planes, Russia is in the process of suspending flights to Cuba and bringing Russian tourists back home. How might the situation further escalate if Cuba continues to receive no oil shipments? Bert Hoffmann: If trucking routes collapse, even aid packages won’t be able to be transported from the harbours to the cities. If that happens, there will be a humanitarian catastrophe the likes of which we can’t imagine. What’s the United States’ goal with this policy of strangulation? Bert Hoffmann: Since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, Cuba has been a symbol – not just for the global left, but also for the right. The Trump administration wants to see this symbol destroyed, but at the same time it doesn’t want an uncontrolled collapse and seeks to avoid pushing thousands of refugees across the ocean towards the United States, as happened in 1994. The United States is interested in stability as much as political change in Havana. What options are available to the Cuban government in this situation? Bert Hoffmann: One thing they can do is try to absorb the shocks of the crisis. The government has announced austerity measures, closed businesses, cancelled events, and suspended bus routes in order to preserve the small amount of fuel it has for the most important priorities. But these are just short-term emergency measures, not solutions. There’s no way around it: oil shipments to the island must resume. If that doesn’t happen very soon, the government will have its back to the wall and will have to start negotiating with the United States. The only leverage that Cuba has in this situation is that only the existing structures (the state administration and the military and security forces) can guarantee stability, meaning the United States is also dependent on those structures. Nevertheless, the United States has got quite the leverage itself in the form of the oil blockade. The Cuban government will likely have to make concessions that would have seemed completely unacceptable six weeks ago, before the US military strike on Venezuela. What can Germany do? Bert Hoffmann: The United States will not look for a third-party mediator in this conflict. But what Germany can do is provide humanitarian help, which would also send a political signal. The United States will not only weaponise the aid it offers to put more pressure on the government in Havana but also make aid conditional upon control over allocation. Germany should follow Mexico in providing humanitarian aid without such political instrumentalisation – simply for the reason that this is what the current emergency faced by the Cuban people demands.