Cuban Crisis took a stunning turn on May 20 after the US Department of Justice charged 94-year-old former president and icon of the Cuban Revolution, Raúl Castro with conspiracy and murder. Meanwhile millions of Cubans sat in darkened homes with no fuel, no power and no relief in sight. China, Russia and left-wing parties across Asia condemned the move. Mass protests erupted in Havana.
Since January 2026, Cuba has been living through what its own government calls the worst energy crisis since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The United States, under President Donald Trump, cut off the island’s main fuel supply from Venezuela, threatened any country that dared replace it with heavy tariffs, and imposed an effective oil blockade that has left the nation of nearly ten million people without reliable electricity, fuel, or basic services.
By May, that oil was gone too. Cuba’s energy minister publicly confirmed the island had exhausted every last barrel of fuel it possessed. Blackouts in Havana stretched beyond twenty hours a day.
Background: How did Cuba end up in this crisis?
Cuba has never been self-sufficient in energy. The island produces only around 40 percent of the fuel it needs and has always depended heavily on allies to cover the rest. During the Cold War, that ally was the Soviet Union. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, Cuba went through a devastating period called the Special Period, when fuel and food became desperately scarce. Venezuela’s leftist government eventually stepped in to fill the gap, supplying Havana with heavily subsidised oil for roughly two decades.
That lifeline ended abruptly in early January 2026. US Special Forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a dramatic operation, and Washington moved quickly to take control of Venezuela’s oil exports.
Cuba lost its largest supplier overnight. Trump then signed an executive order warning that any nation supplying oil to Cuba would face punishing tariffs. Mexico, which had also been sending some fuel to the island, pulled back under that pressure.
Cuba found itself almost completely cut off, left to run its creaking power grid on domestic crude, natural gas and a small amount of solar energy. It was nowhere near enough.
Russia’s move: A public challenge
Russia decided to make its intervention visible. A sanctioned Russian oil tanker named Anatoly Kolodkin crossed the Atlantic in late March carrying 730,000 barrels of crude oil, escorted part of the way by a Russian Navy vessel, and docked at the Cuban port of Matanzas on March 31. The world watched to see whether the United States would block it. Trump did not.
A second vessel, a Hong Kong-flagged tanker carrying Russian gasoil, had already attempted an earlier delivery using deceptive tactics including switching off its location transponder and performing what is known as AIS spoofing to hide its route to Cuba. The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control noticed.
On March 20, it formally added Cuba to a list of countries prohibited from receiving Russian petroleum, in an explicit general licence published for all to see.
Ten days later, Trump reversed himself entirely.
The impossible choice and How Trump escaped it…
This is the part of the story that is arguably the most important. The US faced a strategic trap of its own making when the Russian tanker approached Cuba.
Option one: use naval vessels to physically block the Anatoly Kolodkin in international waters. That would have been an act of aggression against a Russian-flagged ship in open ocean, potentially constituting an act of war under international law. It would have triggered a direct confrontation with a nuclear-armed power at a moment when the world is already watching Russia with extreme caution over Ukraine.
Option two: do nothing and let the ship through. That would mean the United States could not enforce its own blockade in the Caribbean, a region it has dominated for two centuries. It would look like weakness, not just to Russia but to China, Iran, and every other country watching how firmly Washington defends its declared policies.
However, Trump chose a third option.
He reframed the entire episode as a humanitarian gesture, suggesting Cuba’s people deserved to survive even if its government did not, and implied the oil delivery would not change the regime’s ultimate fate anyway. It was a face-saving move dressed as magnanimity. Russia got what it wanted. The US avoided a military confrontation. And both sides could tell their domestic audiences they had won something.
Russia was using the Cuba crisis to position itself as the defender of smaller nations being squeezed by American economic pressure. For Moscow, every barrel of oil it delivers to Havana is also a message to Caracas, Tehran, Pyongyang, and beyond: Russia will show up when America tries to strangle you.
But the Cuban crisis is getting worse…
Unfortunately, Russia’s help was just enough to cover Cuba’s daily energy needs for about nine to ten days. It was not a solution. It was a brief reprieve.
On the night of May 13, Cuba’s Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy appeared on state television to deliver devastating news. The country had exhausted every last barrel of diesel and fuel oil in its possession. There were no reserves. The national electricity grid was in, as he put it, a critical state.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel took to social media to lay the blame directly on Washington. “This dramatic worsening has a single cause: the genocidal energy blockade to which the United States subjects our country, threatening irrational tariffs against any nation that supplies us with fuel,” he wrote on the platform X.
On the nights of May 13 and 14, frustrated Havana residents took to the streets. Crowds blocked roads, piled up garbage as makeshift barricades and shouted demands for electricity, in some of the most visible public protests the capital had seen in years.
How ordinary Cubans are surviving?
For the people living through this crisis, the politics are distant. The blackouts are immediate. Petrol-driven vehicles have largely disappeared from the streets, replaced by the soft hum of electric bicycles and small rechargeable vehicles. Families have adapted their entire daily rhythms around electricity that cannot be predicted. Schools have moved their hours to take maximum advantage of daylight.
Cuba’s health minister has warned that the medical system is approaching catastrophic collapse, with thousands of surgeries deferred and the inability to keep operating theatres consistently powered. Food prices have climbed sharply enough that elderly and disabled residents can no longer afford basic goods.
And yet life goes on. Markets in Havana remain open. It is the quiet stubbornness of a population that has learned, over decades of hardship, to keep moving.
Raúl Castro indicted on murder charges
The charges included conspiracy to murder US citizens, four counts of murder and the destruction of aircraft, all connected to the 1996 downing of two small planes operated by a Miami-based exile group called Brothers to the Rescue. Four people died in that incident, three of them American citizens. Five Cuban military officers were named in the same indictment.
Cuban crisis deepens: China, Russia and the World takes sides
Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun, speaking at a regular press briefing in Beijing on May 21, said Washington was abusing judicial instruments as a tool of political coercion and warned the United States to stop threatening Cuba with force at every turn. He said China firmly and unconditionally opposed unilateral sanctions that lacked any basis in international law or authorisation from the United Nations Security Council.
In January 2026, President Xi Jinping personally approved eighty million dollars in emergency financial assistance to Cuba for electrical equipment, alongside a donation of sixty thousand tonnes of rice. Beijing also delivered ten thousand solar energy systems for isolated homes, maternity wards and clinics across the island.
In India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) released a statement calling the indictment shocking and illegal and urging greater popular mobilisation against American aggression toward Cuba.
Pakistan’s Mazdoor Kisan Party and solidarity movements across South Asia issued similar statements.
What does this mean for India?
This crisis carries layers that go well beyond the Caribbean. India has navigated its own careful balance between Washington and Moscow since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
New Delhi has continued purchasing discounted Russian crude oil despite repeated pressure from the United States and Europe, and has been criticised internationally for doing so.
The Cuba episode demonstrates something important: even the United States itself cannot always enforce its own oil sanctions cleanly when geopolitical and humanitarian pressures collide.
The shadow fleet that delivered oil to Cuba is the same network India and other countries use to buy Russian energy below market prices. The broader geopolitical picture is one of shifting confidence. Russia has demonstrated, in a highly visible way, that it can project influence in the Western Hemisphere and back a friend under pressure without firing a single shot.
Is this a new Cuban Missile Crisis?
The last time Russia and the United States came close to direct confrontation over Cuba was in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. For thirteen days, the world genuinely feared nuclear war. That crisis ended with quiet diplomacy and mutual concession, even though both sides told their publics they had prevailed.
This time, there were no missiles and no ultimatums. Just a tanker full of oil!
What is certain is that Moscow walked away from this episode looking like it had delivered on its promises, while Washington quietly moved the goalposts without admitting it had done so. In geopolitics, that kind of optics gap often matters more than the facts on the ground.
Both governments were managing optics as much as policy. The real cost of all that management is being paid by ordinary Cubans, sitting in the dark, waiting for the lights to come back on.