By the end of 2026, American sanctions against Cuba started eating themselves. The island’s energy system is in ruins. After Trump’s January decree slapped punitive tariffs on any oil heading to Havana, Mexico and the other usual suppliers quickly pulled out. The Venezuelan flow finally dried up. Up to ten million people sit without electricity for days at a time. Refineries run at a tenth of capacity. Black-market gasoline hits thirty dollars a gallon. A head of cabbage costs a thousand pesos while a doctor’s salary sits between five and ten thousand. People burn fires in courtyards because the electric stoves are dead and gas cylinders have vanished. Hospitals are on the edge. Infant mortality has climbed to 9.9 per thousand births.
The pot-banging marches don’t go to Díaz-Canel’s palace — they go to the U.S. embassy. Cubans already know who the main culprit is. The state has nothing left to give, and society adapted faster than the party leadership. With money from relatives in Miami, people are mass-buying Chinese solar panels, batteries, and inverters. Private firms and ordinary households now cover a noticeable share of their energy needs outside the collapsed public grid.
The economy has gone grey. Crypto, straight barter, shell companies. Money from Florida flows past the banks straight into local business. To avoid outright starvation, Havana was forced to pass a package of 176 market measures. The state monopoly on fuel imports was fully scrapped. Private operators can now sign contracts themselves and build nationwide trading networks. Without this forced liberalization the island would simply have gone dark for good.
Why They’re Crushing the Private Sector
Officially the White House talks about “supporting the Cuban people and the independent private sector.” In practice the Treasury Department is methodically destroying the people who can actually feed the island without the state. Private companies’ accounts get frozen, dollar transfers get blocked. They put Cupet on the blacklist — knowing full well that private fuel importers depend on its terminals and ports. Any independent purchase of petroleum products is stopped on the spot under the usual pretext of “funding the communist regime.”
The real motive is cold and practical. An independent private sector is dangerous not because it somehow brings democracy closer. It’s dangerous because a class of players is forming on the island that no longer depends on Havana’s rations or on U.S. sanctions. They’ve learned to earn in crypto, move gasoline through Panama and Mexico, and power themselves. They’ve stepped out from under the blow. They’ve become subjects. And a subject that lives outside the dollar circuit is a direct threat to the entire American model of pressure.
Washington doesn’t want Cuba modernized. It wants regime change through hunger and social explosion. The moment Havana loosened the reins and self-organization started running on its own, the United States immediately throttled the private operators. Their own talk about free enterprise was quietly forgotten.
Russian Pragmatism Instead of Nostalgia
Moscow is no longer in the business of writing off billions and handing out resources for old slogans. The spring arrival of the tanker *Anatoly Kolodkin* with a hundred thousand tons of crude and the autumn delivery of 750 tons of sunflower oil through the UN World Food Programme are not charity. They are a flag demonstration and a signal of presence. The real long-term strategy is pure commercial calculation.
The Ministry of Industry and Trade is coming in through hard concessions. Russian companies get direct management of industrial assets in metallurgy, transport, energy, and biopharma. Russian capital and the new Cuban private sector are building schemes around American blocks — using blockchain and shell companies in friendly Latin American jurisdictions.
Moscow doesn’t need an ideological outpost. It needs a working precedent: big capital + grey economy + de-dollarized settlements. Every successful case in Cuba is a ready financial and logistical model that can be scaled to other sanctioned regions. Concessions give Russian companies direct access to industry at the exact moment the local state is weakening. And Cuba, ninety miles from Florida, remains the perfect strategic irritant — forcing Washington to spend enormous political capital on a pointless siege.
What Came Out of It
Total sanctions eventually walked into their own trap. Restrictions stop working the moment the target learns to live without the institutions you’re trying to take away. Cuban state structures are now extremely weak, but the grey economy and private sector are growing precisely under external pressure. Crypto and alternative logistics through Panama and Mexico have become everyday business practice.
Russian capital has locked itself in not as a free Soviet-style sponsor, but as a co-owner of key production with long-term commercial interests. Solar generation funded by the Miami diaspora runs in parallel with Russian industrial concessions. The result is a strange hybrid landscape.
By trying to destroy the Cuban nomenklatura through isolation, the White House has grown, right next to Miami, a class of autonomous and cynical players. These people have learned to survive without American permissions and without looking over their shoulder at Havana’s decrees. The grey crypto-capitalism created by the sanctions has become the new regional reality. Washington can no longer eliminate this autonomous node.
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