Cuba’s Darkness Has No Foreign Saviors
By Jose E. Navarro, MBA — The Navarro Report
When CIA Director John Ratcliffe landed in Havana on May 14th — unannounced, in a U.S. government plane — it was the kind of moment that doesn’t fit neatly into any script. The same agency Cuba has blamed for decades of covert sabotage was now sitting across the table from Raúl Castro’s grandson, delivering a message: make fundamental changes, and the United States will engage.
Cuba has about 20 hours of blackouts a day. It has run out of fuel. And the three countries it built its survival strategy around — Russia, China, and Iran — are nowhere to be found.
That last part deserves more attention than it’s getting.
For more than sixty years, Havana has played its geopolitical hand as a thorn in Washington’s side, offering its territory as a staging ground for adversaries of the United States. Russia has operated intelligence collection facilities on the island. China expanded its signals intelligence presence significantly over the past decade. Iran has cultivated ties through shared contempt for U.S. foreign policy. Cuba became, in effect, a rented platform — and the rent it collected was aid, oil, and diplomatic cover.
Venezuela was the most consequential arrangement. Cheap Venezuelan oil kept the lights on and the regime afloat. When the Trump administration arrested Nicolás Maduro in January and redirected Venezuela’s oil exports, Cuba lost its lifeline almost overnight. What followed was predictable: the grid collapsed, fuel reserves dried up, and blackouts stretched past twenty hours a day in parts of the country.
So where are the allies?
Russia sent one shipload of donated oil in late March. One shipload. That supply is now exhausted. Moscow, preoccupied with its war in Ukraine and its own economic pressures under Western sanctions, has not followed up in any substantial way. The relationship Cuba counted on has proven to be transactional at best and absent at worst.
China’s posture has been equally revealing. Beijing invested in intelligence infrastructure on the island — not in Cuba’s people or its economy. Chinese companies, facing U.S. secondary sanctions that make any business in Cuba financially dangerous, have largely walked away. Cuba’s inclusion on the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list, reinstated by Trump on day one of his second term, makes doing significant business with Havana a liability most firms won’t absorb. China won’t either, not when the cost-benefit calculus doesn’t work.
Iran has offered rhetoric. That’s about it.
The cruel irony is that Cuba’s government spent decades insisting it didn’t need Washington — and that posture was always subsidized by someone else. Venezuela subsidized it with oil. The Soviet Union subsidized it before that. The island’s resilience was never truly self-generated; it was underwritten by powers who found Cuba strategically useful. The moment Cuba stopped being useful — or the moment those powers faced their own constraints — the support evaporated.
Ratcliffe delivered Trump’s message plainly: the U.S. is prepared to offer $100 million in humanitarian assistance and satellite internet access. Cuba’s government has so far refused to allow it, which tells you something about the regime’s priorities. Ordinary Cubans are losing food to spoiled refrigerators and working shortened hours in sweltering heat. The government’s concern, as ever, is survival — its own.
Whether a deal gets made remains to be seen. Reports of a potential indictment against 94-year-old Raúl Castro, expected around May 20th, suggest Washington is also applying pressure that has nothing to do with diplomacy.
What’s evident is this: the foreign powers Cuba wagered its future on didn’t show up when it mattered. The geopolitical chess game has real consequences for real people, and right now those people are sitting in the dark, wondering who actually has their interests at heart.
It isn’t Moscow. It isn’t Beijing. It isn’t Tehran.
The Navarro Report.