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Suspension of Air Canada flights to Cuba after the country warned airlines of fuel shortages, it represents the latest blow to the island’s economy amid increased pressure from the Trump administration.
Cuba was going through economic difficulties before the US president Donald Trump effectively cut off oil supplies to the island by blocking its main supplier, Venezuelaand threatening tariffs on any country that stepped in to fill the void.
After the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in early January, Trump predicted that the Cuban government would be “ready to fall.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators at a hearing late last month that they would “like to see a change” in the regime, but added that the US would not “make” that change.
The White House has labeled Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US because of the communist nation’s alliances with Russia, China and Iran.
Last week Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel he said his government was willing to enter into negotiations with a Trump administration that could ease some of the economic pain. Whether this means the fall of the Cuban government is an open question.
“We may be reaching a tipping point,” said Max Cameron, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia who studies Latin America.
Cuba has been facing fuel shortages for years, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA has cut exports to avoid fuel shortages at home.
Other suppliers such as Russia and Mexico have also cut oil supplies, which the Cuban government blames on new US sanctions imposed during Trump’s first term and later by former US President Joe Biden.
The shortages led to power outages in the island’s fuel-powered electricity grid. In 2024 the entire population of over 10 million people plunged into darkness when the network ran out of fuel.
Cubans have also faced food and medicine shortages in recent years, exacerbated by hurricanes that have disrupted supplies of essential goods.
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Trump’s blockade of oil in Venezuela, and his order of January 29 that countries will face tariffs if they supply oil to Cuba has added to the pain the country is facing.
Diaz-Canel introduced emergency measures including shorter work weeks and school days, limited transport between provinces and fuel rationing for basic services.
“I know we will live through difficult times. But we will overcome them together, with creative resilience,” he said during a rare press conference on Feb. 5, where he told citizens they must “sacrifice” and “resist.”
Mark Entwistle, who served as Canada’s ambassador to Cuba from 1993 to 1997, said Trump’s campaign to pressure Cuba also puts countries like Canada in a “trap.”
“The reality is we have to manage and renegotiate (the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Free Trade Agreement),” he said in an interview.
“The Canadian government … has to manage the relationship with the US in a wise way, (but at the same time) nobody wants to see the country in America bullied and broken and potentially fall into chaos.”
Entwistle said the federal government will also need to ensure the safety of thousands of Canadians in Cuba.
Global Affairs Canada says it knows of more than 7,200 Canadians in Cuba and provides consular assistance to anyone who requests it.
It also pointed to government travel advisory for Cubawhich was upgraded on February 3 to warn travelers to exercise “a high degree of caution”, citing increasing power outages and shortages of basic necessities.
Canadians have long been a major market for Cuba’s lucrative tourism industry, which once generated $3 billion a year but is struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels. Many resorts were forced to close or reduce their bookings due to shortages of fuel and supplies.
About 754,000 Canadians visited the island last year, down 12 percent from the previous year and well below the annual average of 1.3 million before the pandemic, according to Cuba’s national statistics agency ONEI.
The number still surpasses other top markets like Russia and even Cuban nationals visiting from the US, and even exceeds the total number of visitors from several other countries.
Pedro Monreal, Cuban economist, he said on X this week that Cuba’s tourism industry is increasingly reliant on Canadian visitors and that the recent decline has created “pneumonia” throughout the sector.
The question of who is to blame for Cuba’s economic crisis has led to finger-pointing between the Cuban government and the United States.
The US has had an economic embargo on Cuba since the early 1960s, shortly after Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution in 1959. That embargo was codified into law in the 1990s, and has since been eased and strengthened at various points.
A period of renewed U.S.-Cuban relations under the Obama administration ended when Trump took over the White House in 2017, an approach that continued under Biden.
Díaz-Canel said last week that US sanctions cost the country over $7.5 billion between March 2024 and February 2025, and he called the “energy blockade” implemented by Trump “psychological warfare”.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants with deep ties to Miami’s Cuban community, told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan. 28 that Cuba’s economic woes are the fault of decades of government mismanagement.
“The suffering in rural Cuba is acute and deep, not because of the embargo. But because they don’t know how to run the economy,” he said.
“How is the US embargo to blame that Cuba, one of the world’s largest sugar producers, now imports sugar? Because not a single sector of their society is functioning. It’s frozen and broken.”
Entwistle and Cameron said both sides were partly responsible for the current situation. They said that Cuban investments in health and social services, while laudable, have come at the expense of infrastructure that has been deteriorating for decades.
The US embargo, meanwhile, has blocked foreign investment and made it difficult to procure goods, although countries hostile to the US such as Russia, China and Venezuela have often stepped in to help.
The embargo was also, in the eyes of many experts and researchers, intended to provoke regime change and force Cuba to abandon communism.
Although Entwistle said Cubans were “exhausted” by the worsening economic crisis and would “like to see a change of government,” he added that U.S. pressure was fueling Cuban nationalism and “anti-Americanism.”
“If there is an opinion in Washington that all the Cubans on the island are waiting for them to come or that the Cubans will endure all the suffering to bring about a change of government – suffering even provoked by the US government itself – that is an incorrect assessment,” he said.
Cameron added that the fall of the regime in Cuba could cause a power vacuum and civil strife that could create a new security crisis for the US and the wider region.
“You don’t want to turn Cuba into another Haiti,” he said.
