On Sunday President Donald Trump dismissed the idea of American military action against Cuba but offered a bleak assessment of the economic and political stability in the country. “I think it's just going to fall,” he said. “It's going down for the count.” The turmoil following the capture and extraction of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro by the United States had revived an old, painful question in Cuba. What happens when a close ally that supplies energy to the country might no longer be able to do so?

The U.S. is pressuring Delcy Rodriguez, who was sworn in as Venezuela's president, to halt oil supplies to Cuba, which has been receiving about 35,000 barrels of oil daily from Venezuela in late 2025. The seizure of Venezuela-linked oil tankers in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean by the U.S. forces has increased uncertainty about shipments from Caracas to Havana.

For Cuba, this uncertainty is not abstract. It is about fuel for power plants, transport, and basic services. Still, Venezuela is a stress test. The real root cause of Cuba's crisis is its weak domestic model. Cuba faces a double crisis: an internal crisis of rules, incentives, and legitimacy, and an external crisis of dwindling support and harsher constraints.

The scale of the tragedy is hard to overstate. Cuba's economy is about 15% smaller than it was in 2018. Tourism, a major source of hard currency for the country, remains far below pre-pandemic levels; analyses using official Cuban data show that tourist arrivals in 2025 were less than half the number in 2019. Electricity generation has fallen sharply: the 2025 output was roughly 25% lower than in 2019.

Advertisement

The social indicators are even more alarming because they reveal the breakdown of basic state capacity. Cuba's infant mortality rate—once a flagship achievement—has risen steeply from around 4 per 1,000 live births in 2018 to more than 9 per 1,000 in 2025. The medical workforce has shrunk at a shocking pace: official statistics show the number of registered physicians fell from 106,131 in 2021 to 75,364 by the end of 2024, a 29% decline.

These are not just bad outcomes. They are signs of a system that no longer........

© Time