For many Europeans of my generation, Cuba was as much a progressive cause as a country.
In our selectively idealistic student days (mine were in the mid-1970s), it was a plucky little country that had overthrown a corrupt regime in cahoots with the US mafia. In a popular revolution led by the charismatic Fidel Castro and iconic guerrilla leader Che Guevara, it then withstood a crippling US economic embargo to defend its independence. Hasta la victoria siempre! (Ever onwards to victory!)
Now Cubans are languishing in desperate poverty with little or no electricity, enduring a US blockade of fuel supplies ordered by Donald Trump in a policy of maximum pressure aimed either at toppling the island’s communist rulers or forcing them to open up to US capitalism. The US decision to indict Raúl Castro – Fidel’s 94-year-old brother and successor who remains a key power broker in retirement – for murder over the shooting down of two US light aircraft in 1996 shows how determined Washington is to eliminate the old guard. Factories and transportation are at a standstill for lack of power. Hospitals struggle desperately to treat patients with scant fuel to keep emergency generators working.
Yet few beyond the hard-left fringes of European politics are protesting against the manifestly illegal strangulation of the Cuban economy and people, let alone countering the US strong-arming of Havana by sending fuel or power generators. The world won’t lift a finger to shield Cuba from Trump’s deadly squeeze or to prevent regime change. Even indignation is in short supply.
This is partly because Cuba’s traditional friends and allies – Russia, Venezuela, Mexico and Brazil – are either disabled, distracted or have bigger fish to fry with Washington. It is also because Cubans’ plight is overwhelmingly due to their country’s feckless rulers, who have done little to help their own people.
The fact that Cubans enjoy neither freedom nor prosperity is less down to the US embargo than to decades of communist mismanagement that crushed economic initiative and freedom of expression, in the name of a lowest-common-denominator egalitarianism. “Cuba today is anything but libre,” said Herman Portocarero, a former Belgian and EU ambassador to Havana who negotiated the 2016 EU-Cuba political dialogue and cooperation agreement. “This is a tropical island with lots of fertile soil that for many years has imported 80% of its food.”
The EU and Brazil offered financial incentives and technical assistance to help Cuba transition from sugar cane to food production. “We tried, and the Brazilians tried to do something about that, but we failed. Each time we ran into a wall of ideology, of dogma,” Portocarero said. Up to a million mostly educated Cubans have emigrated in the last two years.
Cuba’s long line of foreign “sugar daddies” ran out in January when Trump’s lightning military assault decapitated Venezuela’s leftist government, abducting the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife to face trial in the US. That ended subsidised Venezuelan oil shipments that were keeping Cuba afloat. With few exports, the country scrapes along on remittances from Cuban exiles, mostly in the US and Canada. Even its iconic Havana Club rum is sold in imported bottles because high energy costs make it uneconomical to make glass in Cuba.
Russia, which in the Soviet era was Havana’s main protector and economic partner, is bogged down in an unwinnable war in Ukraine. It watched impotently as its key Middle Eastern ally, Syria under the Assad regime, was toppled in a civil war and its other regional buddy, Iran, was bombed by the US and Israel. Moscow did send one oil shipment to Cuba in March, which the US let through on “humanitarian” grounds. No other country – not even the leftist-governed Mexico and Brazil – has dared send fuel for fear of incurring US secondary sanctions.
China, which has friendly ties with Havana, has not challenged the US blockade. Xi Jinping has bigger issues to discuss with Trump. There is no indication that Cuba even figured during their summit this month. It’s not a big enough market for China to care. As for Europe, it is more divided than ever over Cuba and preoccupied by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the US-Israeli war on Iran, which has restricted energy supplies and sent fuel prices rocketing.
Within the EU, Spain and France have traditionally been Havana’s main advocates and the most outspoken critics of the US embargo, which has endured since 1962. For years, you could fly directly from Madrid to Havana, but many flights are now being suspended as tourism has collapsed. And for years, the EU unanimously backed an annual UN general assembly resolution calling for an end to the embargo. But in 2025, Hungary voted against it and Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania abstained.
For many on the left, such as veteran politicians Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Cuba issue is about anti-imperialism and sovereignty. But for the right it is about anti-communism and individual freedom, especially in the central European countries that lived for decades under Soviet domination.
Even Spain, where a leftwing government has prided itself on standing up to the US by condemning the war on Iran and refusing to allow its bases to be used for the operation, has been oddly muted about Trump’s coercion of its former colony. To be sure, the leaders of Spain, Mexico and Brazil issued a joint statement last month condemning “the dire situation” the Cuban people face. They called for respect for sovereignty and international law, but made no explicit mention of the US or the oil blockade and pledged only increased humanitarian aid, not energy supplies.
Whether Washington imposes a “deal” on Cuba’s current leaders or tightens its noose in a bid to overthrow them, don’t expect Europe to do anything to stop the next episode in the “Donroe doctrine”. Europeans, too, have bigger fish to fry with Trump. They may have history with Cuba, but the US has geography and geopolitics on its side.