On June 11, Secretary of State Marco Rubio added the state-owned company Unión Cuba-Petróleo (CUPET), which imports and refines nearly all the fuel consumed on the island, to the list of entities blocked by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. This measure prohibits any company or bank with a presence in the U.S. market from doing business with the company. That same week, a Florida-based company had finalized the largest fuel agreement between the United States and Cuba since 1960, intended to supply Cuba’s private sector using storage tanks leased from an entity linked to CUPET. In other words, Washington spent four months building an alternative only to block it afterward. As if that were not enough, the refineries sanctioned today are the very same ones Washington blocked sixty years ago, a decision that ultimately shaped relations between the two countries.
The historical parallel is striking. In June 1960, Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson summoned executives from Esso and Texaco to ask them, on behalf of President Eisenhower, to refuse to refine the Soviet crude that Castro had exchanged for sugar. They complied with the request, and within weeks Castro confiscated the refineries. Eisenhower then cut Cuba’s sugar quota, mass expropriations followed in August, and the embargo was imposed in October.
The pressure did not break the Revolution; it pushed Cuba toward the Soviet bloc and handed Moscow a client just ninety miles from Florida—the very outcome the United States had sought to avoid. Esso’s old Belot refinery now operates as Ñico López, while Texaco’s plant in Santiago is now known as Hermanos Díaz. Rubio’s statement describes these assets as having been “illegally expropriated from U.S. owners.” That is true, but it omits the fact that the expropriations were a response to a U.S. directive aimed at strangling the island’s fuel supply.
The comparison with Venezuela
There are two fronts to consider. First, Cuba lacks an organized opposition like the one María Corina Machado built in Venezuela. Second, Caracas entered a managed transition because Washington found domestic actors capable of negotiating it.
Does Cuba have a comparable figure? Possibly one. Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, the deputy prime minister who opened the door to private fuel imports, is regarded as a possible successor to Díaz-Canel. He also happens to be the great-grandnephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro—a fact that mattered far less before Washington indicted Raúl three weeks ago. Negotiations require an interlocutor, and Washington is alienating one of the few available.
The death this week of Ramiro Valdés deepens that paradox. At 94, Valdés was the last member of the Revolution’s founding generation to maintain active institutional ties within the security apparatus he himself had helped build. With his passing, the bridge between the founding generation and the military-business establishment that effectively governs Cuba has disappeared. What remains is a structure with no ideological or historical anchor and every incentive to resist any transition that could jeopardize its assets, networks, and personnel.
A new blockade
In Cuba, there is no infrastructure outside the state company that operates the refineries, controls the import terminals in Matanzas, and owns the storage facilities through which every fuel shipment entering the island passes before being converted into electricity or diesel. The agreement reached by the Florida-based company provided for the sale of a quarter of a million barrels per month exclusively to private buyers, bypassing the state. But the blockade on CUPET freezes the storage contract, which relies on the only storage facilities available on the island.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of ExxonMobil against CUPET over the 1960 confiscations, stripping the company of its sovereign immunity shield.
The sequence of escalation is clear. The Department of Justice unsealed the indictment against Raúl Castro on May 20. The Treasury had already sanctioned GAESA and Díaz-Canel. CIA Director John Ratcliffe quietly traveled to Havana. The USS Nimitz completed exercises in the Caribbean. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Guantánamo on June 10, and Rubio announced that Washington is willing to negotiate. The question is: with whom? Washington is intent on discrediting one of the few officials positioned to say yes.
On June 18, Cuba approved 176 measures that include private banking and foreign investment without joint ventures, described by international observers as the most far-reaching economic reform since the Revolution. Washington responded with new sanctions and rejected the measures because they did not include political changes. No matter how ambitious the economic opening may be, it still falls short of the threshold Washington has established.
And here lies the most troubling paradox. The expropriations happened, the repression is real, and the blackouts are not propaganda. None of this resembles the fabricated intelligence that preceded the intervention in Iraq. As a result, every new designation that fails to move Havana adds another line to the record suggesting that every possible measure was tried before resorting to war.
Lessons from the past
The events of 1960 offer lessons that Washington refuses to consider, although this time the dependency runs in a different direction. Russia pledged one billion dollars in investment by 2030, vowed to oppose any military intervention, and managed to send only a single tanker to Cuba throughout the entire year—with Washington’s permission.
China, however, is another story. Chinese equipment and financing connected 49 solar parks to Cuba’s power grid in just one year, increasing solar generation from less than 6% to more than 20%, with 92 parks scheduled to be completed by 2028. Every barrel of fuel that Washington blocks increases the value of the solar panels China supplies. Sixty years ago, Eisenhower’s pressure handed Cuba’s energy dependence to the Soviet Union; the Trump administration is handing the island’s energy future to China.
The blackouts are wearing down the bakeries and small private workshops that make up the only segment of the Cuban economy with genuine independence from the state. But what this new blockade has achieved is a more hardline security apparatus, deeper dependence on Beijing, and an interlocutor with no credibility left to negotiate.
Washington’s previous blockade of these very same refineries cost it sixty years of problems. The odds have not improved.
Autor
Profesor de ciencia política en la Universidad del Norte de Texas en Dallas. Estudioso cubanoamericano de las relaciones civiles-militares y de la política exterior de Estados Unidos hacia América Latina.
