Trump Can’t Make Cuba Great Again. Only Cubans Can Do It.

On Sunday President Donald Trump dismissed the idea of American military action against Cuba but offered a bleak assessment of the economic and political stability in the country. “I think it’s just going to fall,” he said. “It’s going down for the count.” The turmoil following the capture and extraction of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro by the United States had revived an old, painful question in Cuba. What happens when a close ally that supplies energy to the country might no longer be able to do so?

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The U.S. is pressuring Delcy Rodriguez, who was sworn in as Venezuela’s president, to halt oil supplies to Cuba, which has been receiving about 35,000 barrels of oil daily from Venezuela in late 2025. The seizure of Venezuela-linked oil tankers in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean by the U.S. forces has increased uncertainty about shipments from Caracas to Havana.

For Cuba, this uncertainty is not abstract. It is about fuel for power plants, transport, and basic services. Still, Venezuela is a stress test. The real root cause of Cuba’s crisis is its weak domestic model. Cuba faces a double crisis: an internal crisis of rules, incentives, and legitimacy, and an external crisis of dwindling support and harsher constraints.

The twin crises of Cuba

The scale of the tragedy is hard to overstate. Cuba’s economy is about 15% smaller than it was in 2018. Tourism, a major source of hard currency for the country, remains far below pre-pandemic levels; analyses using official Cuban data show that tourist arrivals in 2025 were less than half the number in 2019. Electricity generation has fallen sharply: the 2025 output was roughly 25% lower than in 2019.

The social indicators are even more alarming because they reveal the breakdown of basic state capacity. Cuba’s infant mortality rate—once a flagship achievement—has risen steeply from around 4 per 1,000 live births in 2018 to more than 9 per 1,000 in 2025. The medical workforce has shrunk at a shocking pace: official statistics show the number of registered physicians fell from 106,131 in 2021 to 75,364 by the end of 2024, a 29% decline.

These are not just bad outcomes. They are signs of a system that no longer protects what it must and no longer delivers what it promises. When people cannot plan a week ahead—because power cuts, transport, and basic supplies are unstable—the economy becomes brittle. When institutions struggle to provide routine services, the state loses authority, even among citizens who avoid politics.

This brings us to the internal half of the crisis: Cuba’s model has become a machine for discouraging initiative and avoiding accountability. Economically, the system still treats private production as something to control rather than something to grow. The private sector has been allowed to expand, then pulled back, repeatedly, leaving entrepreneurs and professionals with a simple lesson: don’t build too much, don’t plan too far ahead, and always keep an exit option. That’s not how development happens. That’s how informality spreads, and productivity dies.

Politically, the concentration of power and lack of transparency and accountability are not only moral issues; they are performance issues. Without open debate, independent associations, and real feedback loops, policy errors last longer, competence is harder to reward, and failure is easier to hide. Over time, the system loses talent, and the state becomes less capable even as the crisis becomes more complex.

Let us now consider the external half of Cuba’s crisis. The Cuban leadership has long relied on a familiar pattern: when conditions get tight at home, seek relief abroad. In the past, that relief came from Soviet subsidies, later from Venezuelan oil, and more recently from limited support from partners like Russia, China, and Mexico.

Cuba has squandered the goodwill of governments across the ideological spectrum. Instead of treating external support as a bridge toward transformation, it has repeatedly relied on special arrangements to preserve mere survival. Today’s global environment is less forgiving. The outside world is changing, and Cuba is entering it with weak institutions and few buffers.

This is why a disruption in Venezuela is so dangerous. Experts estimate that Cuba’s current oil demand is slightly over 100,000 barrels per day; if a quarter to a third of that depends on Venezuela, a major interruption could push the country toward a subsistence zone, especially because Cuba cannot readily replace that volume through cash purchases.

The way forward for Havana

If the diagnosis begins with the model, the solution must also begin there. No outside actor can “fix” Cuba in place of Cubans. Any approach built on that illusion will backfire. The only durable path forward is a Cuban-led redesign—supported, not substituted, from the outside.

What would a workable “New Cuba” look like in practical terms? Not as a slogan, but as a set of basic components that address the failures revealed by the numbers.

First, Cuba needs legitimacy and accountability in governance. Cuba doesn’t need cosmetic reforms or controlled elections that change little. It requires institutions that reflect the country’s real diversity and enable the peaceful correction of policy mistakes. That means clearer limits on power, robust checks, and rules that allow citizens to participate without fear—through civic groups, professional associations, independent media, and local initiatives. A government that asks people to endure hard economic adjustments cannot rely solely on control; it must earn consent.

Second, Cuba needs to move to a productive economy with rules that make effort pay. Cuba needs to provide lawful enterprise space to operate: stable permissions, predictable taxation and regulation, clearer property and contract rules, and the ability to reinvest, import, export, hire, and grow. This does not require abandoning the social commitment many Cubans still value. Without growth, social guarantees become empty; without a basic social floor, reforms lose public support and can turn unstable. The objective is not to copy any foreign model but to build a Cuban mixed system that rewards work and talent while protecting basic dignity.

A third component of renewing and transforming Cuba is a professional state. Cuba’s crisis is not only ideological—it is about state capability. Energy policy cannot be managed as propaganda. Fiscal policy cannot be managed as improvisation. Public health cannot be sustained when inputs are missing, and professionals leave. Cuba requires transparent budgeting, credible statistics, and a public administration in which performance matters. These are the minimum conditions for a functional state.

Finally, Cuba must treat national reunification as a development strategy rather than a political concession. The diaspora is not a problem to manage; it is a national asset—capital, skills, networks, and a bridge to markets. A New Cuba should create safe, legal channels for the diaspora to invest, partner, and participate in public life without permanent suspicion. Many countries have followed this path to rebuild after long decline: by making their diasporas a part of the national recovery.

So far, the Cuban system has offered little evidence that it can solve concrete problems—or, more importantly, carry out the transformations required to make it work. Even some of its most prominent allies allies have complained in recent years about its clear inability to implement reforms that would make the economy productively viable.

The official Cuban narrative is often saturated with references to external causes of the crisis—with American sanctions as the preferred target—and refuses to acknowledge the outright failure of its economic model and the domestic drivers of the national crisis. In doing so, the Cuban government creates a harmful imbalance in how these two dimensions are described and weighed. The result is that too little time and political capital are devoted to changing what is actually under the government’s direct control.

Of Havana and Washington

How shall the United States approach Cuba?

Geography and history ensure that the U.S. policy will shape Cuba’s context, but it should not feed the illusion that Cuba’s future will be directed from abroad. That posture strengthens hardliners inside Cuba and invites overconfidence outside it. Washington would be wiser to avoid actions that close space for Cuban-led change, and to calibrate its policies, instead, to encourage steps that expand Cubans’ real autonomy: the autonomy to work and earn legally, to build businesses, to communicate without constraint, to associate, and to hold institutions accountable.

In practice, this means abandoning reflexes. Pressure with no credible pathway to change can harden control and deepen Cuba’s dependence on whichever patrons are still willing to underwrite and subsidize its stagnation. Engagement without benchmarks can become a reward for inertia.

There is, in fact, a third way—one that demands both patience and precision. Washington should keep the focus on Cuban society and coax Havana toward incremental reforms: the kind that create room for legal economic activity and basic civic life, while constraining the opportunities for rent extraction that closed systems create. That would nudge open the cracks through which change might eventually arrive.

The turmoil in Venezuela should be read as a warning against two fantasies: that a foreign ally can rescue Cuba without deep reforms, and that external pressure alone will produce a satisfactory outcome. The economic data suggest that the old operating system is failing, and postponing a redesign of governance and the economy entails increasing costs for Cuba.

Cuba is not short of pride, talent, or civic capacity. It is short of rules that allow its assets to work. The root cause of Cuba’s tragedy is Cuban; the remedy for Cuba will be Cuban, too. External shocks may accelerate the timeline, but they do not determine the outcome.

Only Cubans can do that—by rebuilding a state that deserves trust and an economy that finally gives people a reason to stay, invest, and live with dignity. There are no guarantees, but whatever agency remains must be leveraged to begin national renewal now.