The U.S. oil blockade is pushing the island and its communist regime to the brink of collapse.

What’s the situation in Cuba? 
The country is running out of fuel—and fast. Oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s main fuel supplier for the past three decades, ended in January after the U.S. attacked the South American country and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro. President Trump then declared a full oil blockade, threatening severe tariffs on any country that sent Cuba fuel. The blockade has exacerbated a long-simmering economic and humanitarian crisis for Cuba’s 11 million people. Blackouts of up to 20 hours are routine, and their consequences are severe: Running water has been cut off in many urban areas because the systems rely on electric pumps; trash has piled up for lack of gas to run garbage trucks; and doctors say preventable deaths are rising as equipment fails. In late March, the U.S. Coast Guard allowed a single Russian oil tanker carrying about 730,000 barrels of oil to pass through the blockade, providing Cuba with at best a few weeks of fuel. “It’s not going to have an impact—Cuba is finished,” Trump said. “And whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.”

How did Cuba get here? 
The island has been under U.S. sanctions for nearly seven decades. What began with an arms embargo during the Cuban Revolution in 1958 was broadened into a full trade and travel embargo after Fidel Castro established his communist government. While Castro’s rule saw an expansion of access to education and health care, alongside those gains came political repression and the confiscation and nationalization of private land, businesses, and homes, prompting millions of Cubans to flee. The U.S. trade embargo— the longest in modern history—intensified Cuba’s chronic economic woes, which deepened after the collapse in 1991 of its main foreign backer, the Soviet Union. The Cold War–era embargo continued until the second term of President Barack Obama, who sought to ease what he called “a rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”

What did Obama do?
Believing a rapprochement could reduce repression on the island and provide economic opportunities for ordinary Cubans, he opened discussions in 2014 with Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor. The Obama administration restored diplomatic relations and struck Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. In March 2016, Obama became the first U.S. president to set foot in Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. Americans were allowed to travel to Cuba for “educational” purposes for the first time in decades, and direct commercial flights resumed and embassies opened. Cuba’s tourism revenue jumped 15% in the first half of 2016, and a record 4 million foreigners visited that year. But few Cubans reaped benefits, as increased demand for food and poor planning caused shortages and price hikes. “It’s a disaster,” said Lisset Felipe, a government-employed air conditioner seller, in 2016. “We never lived luxuriously, but the comfort we once had doesn’t exist anymore.”

Why didn’t the thaw last? 
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump pledged to undo Obama’s policies—promises that helped him win the votes of a majority of Cuban Americans in Florida. In office, he imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba and put the country back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Though President Joe Biden reversed that move in his last week in office in January 2025, Trump quickly reimposed it after returning to the White House last year with a newfound interest in Latin America, heavily influenced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a foreign policy hawk and the son of Cuban immigrants. Trump’s first target was Venezuelan autocrat Maduro, a close ally of Cuba, and many Cuban Americans saw that intervention as a step toward realizing Rubio’s desire to topple the island’s communist government. “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned—at least a little bit,” Rubio warned hours after the January raid that captured Maduro.

What does the White House want? 
The end of Cuba’s communist government. The Trump administration has been negotiating with President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s regime and seems inclined to avoid using military force, hoping the blockade will inspire Cubans to rise up against their government. Protests are spreading, with furious residents banging pots and chanting, “We’ve had enough,” “Freedom,” and “Put the lights back on.” In the central city of Morón last month, protesters set the Communist Party’s local headquarters on fire—the biggest show of dissent in years. But the blockade is also inflicting pain on ordinary Cubans. “The U.S. is trying to punish the Cuban government,” said one Havana resident. “But it’s the people who are suffering.”

How do Cubans feel about the blockade? 
They’re desperate. In a country where the official average monthly wage is about $15, gas is now nearly $40 a gallon—if you can find it. There were three major blackouts in March, and the United Nations has warned the blockade will result in a “severe humanitarian crisis,” with fuel shortages hitting every aspect of the island’s food system, from irrigation and harvesting to refrigeration and distribution. Health experts predict diseases such as dengue and chikungunya will return. Cuba’s once-vaunted health system is collapsing. There’s little fuel for ambulances, doctors and nurses are unable to commute to work, and pharmacy shelves are bare. Many refrigerated medicines spoil when the power goes out. Doctors say premature births are increasing as an antibiotic shortage leads to rising infections. It’s also getting harder to administer chemotherapy amid blackouts, and patients on ventilators now rely on backup batteries or hand pumps. “I don’t know how long we can keep going,” said Xenia Álvarez, whose 21-year-old son’s lungs can’t pump air on their own. “His life depends on electricity.”

Every day and every week, it becomes more alarmingly evident that in the White House “a mad king reigns, virtually unchecked,” said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. Since he launched the frustrating war in Iran, President Trump has “reversed and contradicted himself repeatedly” about its goals while descending into enraged, profanity-flecked threats of genocide. On Easter Sunday, with Iran defying his demands to open the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, our commander in chief posted on Truth Social: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He threatened to completely destroy Iran’s power plants, bridges, and infrastructure—leaving 93 million Iranians without electricity, running water, or functioning hospitals—and followed two days later with this genocidal vow: “A whole civilization will die tonight.” In everything the nearly 80-year-old Trump does, he shows the world “he is mentally unstable, unfit for the office.” When Pope Leo XIV criticized the war in Iran and Trump’s brutal immigration roundups, Trump posted that the pontiff was “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” before following up with an AI-generated image of himself as a robed Jesus Christ healing a sick man—later claiming it depicted him “as a doctor.” That was too much even for onetime acolytes, said Makena Kelly and David Gilbert in Wired. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcasters Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, among others, denounced Trump’s depiction of himself as the Messiah, and called for him to be removed from office, with Greene suggesting that Trump may actually be the Antichrist. Greene told former MAGA allies: “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”

It’s no longer just Democrats and late-night comics questioning Trump’s sanity, said Peter Baker in The New York Times. Retired generals, former Republican officials, and foreign leaders are expressing deep concern about the “state of mind” of “the oldest president ever inaugurated.” In his second term, Trump “seems even less restrained and more incoherent,” publicly using profanity, wandering off at official meetings “into odd tangents” about poisonous snakes, Sharpie pens, and his White House ballroom, and repeatedly calling Greenland “Iceland” while insisting it should belong to him. He appalled allies when he gloated that liberal Hollywood director Rob Reiner had been allegedly stabbed to death by his son, and when, after the death of former FBI director and special counsel Robert Mueller, he said, “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.” After Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran, Democrats have called on the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump for mental unfitness, but he has surrounded himself with fawning loyalists, “rendering that idea moot.” Trump’s “chest-thumping and semi-coherent bluster” are nothing new, said Becket Adams in National Review, but now that he’s started a war of choice in the Middle East, he’s provided “the added bonus of a ticking body count”—including more than 3,600 Iranians and at least 13 Americans. It’s “fully reasonable” to question why our president keeps “teetering frantically between talk of peace and threats, promising terrible outcomes that no American has had time to consider, let alone endorse.”

Trump haters may “clutch at their pearls,” said Hugo Gurdon in the Washington Examiner, but he has a long, successful track record of issuing “bellicose threats” and making “outlandish” demands to get the other side to the negotiating table. Hasn’t anyone learned “he should be taken seriously, not literally?” Sorry, said Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, but it smacks of “desperation” to claim Trump is cleverly using Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” to intimidate Iran into concessions. Trump’s wild, irresponsible threats “achieved next to nothing.” Iran did not reopen the strait or surrender to his other demands. 

All this “is utterly exhausting for Americans and the world,” said Sohrab Ahmari in Unherd. Trump owes his presidency to voters who grew tired of technocrats such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama overriding the public will to make trade, economic, and immigration policy, “often to the benefit of themselves and other elites.” But Trump “went into mad-king mode,” and the results make liberal technocrats “look better by comparison.” This is life “under a personalist regime,” said Lisa Needham in Public Notice, where all power is held by a cultlike leader “not accountable to the military or to a political party.” Trump “reverses decisions based on nothing but whims.” He demands that aides and followers show loyalty by “agreeing to believe the same lies he does.” When “Congress and the Supreme Court simply step aside and abdicate their power, then it’s all Trump, all the time.” Personalist government has brought us nonstop chaos, corruption, bitter division, and foreign conflict, and “it’s wrecking us.”

Nathan Lane was utterly unprepared for a spotlight to be shone on his sexuality, said Juan A. Ramírez in The Guardian (U.K.). A Broadway stalwart since the early 1980s, Lane rocketed to Hollywood fame after being cast as a drag queen in 1996’s The Birdcage. While promoting the movie, he and Robin Williams—who played his on-screen partner—sat for an interview with Oprah Winfrey, who asked Lane if he feared being typecast as gay and “people forever saying: Are you? Are you not?” Lane had come out to friends and family decades earlier, but the idea of announcing he was gay on national TV left him lost for words and visibly uncomfortable. “In those days,” he says, “you might as well say: ‘And by the way, I love cock.’ I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t brave enough.” Williams stepped in to redirect the line of questioning, a move Lane, 70, attributes to the late actor’s “incredibly kind, generous soul.” He holds no grudges against Winfrey, who he thinks was just being playful. But he recalls how, a few weeks after the interview, he was stuck in Manhattan traffic when another driver spotted him and shouted, “‘Hey, faggot! Hey, faggot!’ It was humiliating, I went: ‘Well, this is the other side of fame.’” Lane came out publicly in a magazine profile a few years later, but by that point “it was like: ‘Yeah, big deal, we already knew.’ So there was no winning that one.”