HAVANA: Massive power outages in Cuba meant that many people awoke Friday unaware that US President Donald Trump had threatened to impose tariffs on any country that sells or supplies oil to the Caribbean island.
As word spread in Havana and beyond, anger and anguish boiled over about the decision that will only make life harder for Cubans already struggling with an increase in US sanctions.
“This is a war,” said Lázaro Alfonso, an 89-year-old retired graphic designer.
He described Trump as the “sheriff of the world” and said he feels like he’s living in the Wild West, where anything goes.
After Trump made the announcement late Thursday, he described Cuba as a “failing nation” and said, “it looks like it’s something that’s just not going to be able to survive.”
Alfonso, who lived through the severe economic depression in the 1990s known as the ” Special Period ” following cuts in Soviet aid, said the current situation in Cuba is worse, given the severe blackouts, a lack of basic goods and a scarcity of fuel.
“The only thing that’s missing here in Cuba … is for bombs to start falling,” he said.
Cuba is hit every day with widespread outages blamed on fuel shortages and crumbling infrastructure that have deepened an economic crisis exacerbated by a fall in tourism, an increase in US sanctions and a failed internal financial reform to unify the currency. Now Cubans worry new restrictions on oil shipments will only make things worse.
On Friday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said on X that Trump’s measure was “fascist, criminal and genocidal” and asserted that his administration “has hijacked the interests of the American people for purely personal gain.”
Meanwhile, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez wrote on X that Trump’s measure “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat” and said he was declaring an international emergency.
Trump previously said he would halt oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s biggest ally, after the US attacked the South American country and arrested its leader.
Meanwhile, there is speculation that Mexico would slash its shipments to Cuba.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday that she would seek alternatives to continue helping Cuba and prevent a humanitarian crisis after Trump’s announcement.
Sheinbaum said one option could be for the United States itself to manage the shipment of Mexican oil to the island, although it was necessary to first understand the details of Trump’s order.
Mexico became a key supplier of fuel to Cuba, along with Russia, after the US sanctions on Venezuela paralyzed the delivery of crude oil to the island.
“It’s impossible to live like this,” said Yanius Cabrera Macías, 47, a Cuban street vendor who sells bread and sweet snacks.
He said he doesn’t believe Cuba is a threat to the United States.
“Cuba is a threat to Cubans, not to the United States. For us Cubans here, it is the government that is a threat to us,” he said, adding that Trump’s latest measure would hit hard. “In the end, it’s the people who suffer … not the governments.”
Jorge Piñon, an expert at the University of Texas Energy Institute who tracks shipments using satellite technology, said there is no answer to a key question: how many days’ worth of fuel does Cuba have?
If no tanker looms in the horizon within the next four to eight weeks, Piñón warned Cuba’s future would be grim.
“This is now a critical situation because the only country we had doubts about was Mexico,” he said, noting that diesel is “the backbone of the Cuban economy.”
Piñón noted that the Chinese don’t have oil, and that all they could do is give Cuba credit to buy oil from a third party. Meanwhile, he called Russia a “wild card: It has so many sanctions that one more doesn’t bother (Vladimir) Putin,” adding that because of those sanctions, a lot of Russian oil is looking for a destination.
Meanwhile, many Cubans continue to live largely in darkness.
Luis Alberto Mesa Acosta, a 56-year-old welder, said he is often unable to work because of the ongoing outages, which remind him of the “Special Period” that he endured.
“I don’t see the end of the tunnel anywhere,” he said, adding that Cubans need to come together and help each other.
Daily demand for power in Cuba averages some 3,000 megawatts, roughly half what is available during peak hours.
Dayanira Herrera, mother of a five-year-old boy, said she struggles to care for him because of the outages, noting they spend evenings on their stoop.
She couldn’t believe it when she heard on Wednesday morning what Trump had announced.
“The end of the world,” she said of the impact it would have on Cuba.
Anger and anguish spread across Cuba as it learns of Trump’s tariff threat on those who provide oil
https://arab.news/nckx7
Anger and anguish spread across Cuba as it learns of Trump’s tariff threat on those who provide oil
- Cuba is hit every day with widespread outages blamed on fuel shortages
- Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Trump’s measure was “fascist, criminal and genocidal”
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
