Cuba's Government Faces Collapse as Trump Weighs US Response

Summary

Cuba is in freefall. Fuel shortages have left the island without reliable electricity for months, food scarcity is acute, and an emigration wave unprecedented even by Cuban standards has drained the country of roughly 10 percent of its population since 2022. The government of Miguel Díaz-Canel, already stripped of the Castro family mystique that held the revolutionary project together for six decades, is struggling to project even the appearance of control. Into that vacuum steps a familiar American fixation: Donald Trump, who has long treated Cuba as unfinished business, rhetorically and politically. CNN's Cuba correspondent Patrick Oppmann has been watching this deterioration up close, and his read is that the Cuban state is weaker right now than at any point since 1959. The question hanging over Washington is what, if anything, the US does about it. Trump has already reimposed the tightest sanctions of the modern era during his first term, and his orbit has floated more aggressive options. Whether that means covert pressure, harder economic strangulation, or something more dramatic remains genuinely unclear. J.D. Vance's own presidential ambitions add a second layer of intrigue to how the administration calculates its Cuba posture over the next four years.