Cuba's government has confirmed it is holding secret bilateral talks with the United States, which is a remarkable thing to do with the country that is simultaneously blockading your oil supply and leaving you with exactly one tanker's worth of fuel since January. Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz went public with the confirmation this week, describing the process as 'sensitive in nature,' which is diplomatic understatement of a very high order.
One Tanker. The Whole Year.
Let's start with the number that should be lighting up every front page in the world. According to teleSUR English, only one oil tanker has arrived in Cuba in all of 2026. One. The Russian vessel Anatoly Kolodkin docked in March and that has been it. We are now past the midpoint of the year.
This is a direct result of an executive order Trump signed on January 29, which threatens tariffs on goods imported from any country that supplies oil to Cuba. The threat worked. Suppliers dried up. Ships stopped coming. And an island nation of eleven million people has been running on fumes, literally, for months.
TeleSUR English reports that the fuel shortage has hammered healthcare, education, water supply, electricity generation, agriculture, and transportation. Not some of those things. All of them. The entire scaffolding of daily life.
Cuba Called It Genocide at the U.N. and They Were Not Being Dramatic
Cuba brought its case to the United Nations General Assembly on July 7, describing the oil blockade as an act of genocide and collective punishment. The international community heard those denunciations. Whether anything results from that is, historically speaking, not a bet you'd want to take.
The language Cuba chose at the U.N. is striking but not without basis. When you deliberately cut off a country's fuel supply in a way that shuts down hospitals and water pumps and food production, you are not conducting foreign policy. You are conducting something closer to siege warfare. The fact that it's done through tariff threats rather than naval vessels doesn't change what it accomplishes.
Trump's administration has been publicly cheerful about all of this. The hostile rhetoric from Washington has accompanied every step of the pressure campaign, per teleSUR English. This is not a sanctions regime being enforced reluctantly. It's being done with enthusiasm.
So Why Is Cuba Talking to These People?
Here is where it gets interesting. Despite all of the above, Cuba has confirmed ongoing bilateral talks with the United States. Marrero Cruz acknowledged the conversations publicly this week, saying the negotiating team has the explicit backing and mandate of both Army General Raúl Castro and President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
That detail matters. When you invoke Raúl Castro's name in Cuba, you are not leaving room for anyone to question the legitimacy of what's happening. This is not a rogue diplomatic effort. The old guard has signed off.
Marrero Cruz also issued a pointed warning about what he called manipulations and calls for internal fracture, attacks designed, in his framing, to sow uncertainty and distrust among the Cuban population. Reading between those lines: someone is trying to use the talks to create the impression of a divided Cuban leadership, and Havana is pushing back on that narrative hard.
The Trap Hidden Inside the Negotiations
Bilateral talks between a desperate country and the country causing the desperation are not exactly negotiations conducted between equals. Cuba is sitting across the table from the administration that signed the order cutting off its oil, and doing so while hospitals struggle to keep the lights on. That is a negotiating position roughly equivalent to asking your landlord for a rent extension while he's standing in your doorway holding your belongings.
The question worth asking is what Washington actually wants here. The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to see regime change in Cuba. Decades of American policy toward the island have orbited around that goal. Whether these talks represent a genuine diplomatic opening or a pressure campaign dressed up in conversation is something teleSUR English's reporting doesn't settle, and probably can't yet.
What is settled is that the humanitarian situation is severe enough that Cuba felt it had to engage, sensitivity and all. That tells you something about how bad it is on the ground.
The Dingo Take
The United States is blockading a small island nation's oil supply with an executive order, triggering a humanitarian crisis confirmed before the U.N. General Assembly, and the coverage in American media has been essentially nonexistent. Think about that for a second. If any other country were using tariff threats to shut off fuel to eleven million people, to collapse their healthcare and water systems, we would have a name for it by now and that name would not be 'foreign policy.'
Trump's January 29 executive order is one of the most consequential things his administration has done in its second term and it has barely registered in mainstream American discourse. One tanker. All year. That's the headline that should be everywhere and instead we're arguing about something else entirely, as we always seem to be whenever this administration does something that would have been treated as a five-alarm crisis under any previous president.
Cuba is talking to Washington because Cuba is out of options. That's not diplomacy. That's duress. And if the talks produce a deal that gets the fuel flowing again, the Trump team will call it a win and no one will ask too hard about what was extracted in exchange. History suggests that whatever Cuba gives up in these conversations, the embargo won't end, the pressure won't end, and the next administration will inherit a relationship just as broken as the one before. Some cycles are remarkably hard to exit.
