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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. For decades, the United States has treated Cuba as a special case—from the crackpot 1960s CIA schemes to kill Fidel Castro, to the extremely generous immigration policy for Cuban arrivals on American shores, to the opening of relations during the Obama administration. The U.S. has never quite known how to approach the nominally communist country off the coast of Florida.
The second Trump administration, however, has taken unprecedented economic steps to isolate the island, and Donald Trump himself is talking about Cuba in ways that no previous American president has—or could even imagine.
Here to discuss what’s happening in the country and what the U.S. government might actually want, we’re joined by two experts on Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations. We’re joined by Michael J. Bustamante, associate professor of history and director of the Cuban Studies Program at the University of Miami. Welcome, Michael.
Michael J. Bustamante: Thanks for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: And we’ve also got Jen Triplett, assistant professor of sociology and a researcher focused on Latin America at the University of Colorado Boulder. Welcome, Jen.
Jen Triplett: Happy to be here.
Alexis Madrigal: Michael Bustamante, why don’t you bring us up to date on what’s happened in 2025? We’re going to go back further in time—you kind of have to here—but let’s start with what’s happened since the Trump administration came into office.
Michael J. Bustamante: Sure. The Trump administration came into office with Cuba already in a deep crisis—and not to get ahead of your question by going further back—but Cuba has had a very difficult run, at the very least since the pandemic and, in fact, since the first Trump administration.
So when this administration comes in, they sense there’s an opportunity—that the Cuban government has its back against the wall. One of the really striking things they did early on in 2025 vis-à-vis Cuba was tighten immigration policy for Cubans. Many of the unprecedented number of Cubans who had come to the United States under the Biden administration lost their status. There are about 500,000 Cubans today in immigration limbo. Many are being detained and deported.
That’s part and parcel of what’s evolved into a broader “maximum pressure” strategy on the island. The theory is that you want to create pressure on the Cuban economy, and you can’t let people leave either. That’s only accelerated since 2026 and the ouster of Maduro, and I suppose—
Alexis Madrigal: We’ll get into all of that. I’m curious, though: the U.S. has maintained an embargo—or blockade, in some sense—on Cuba for a very long time. So how has that apparatus actually changed during the Trump administration’s second term?
Michael J. Bustamante: In a way, at least before 2026, not a ton. And part of that is because, going back to the Obama administration—which you mentioned in your lead-in—there was a historic effort not to undo the embargo completely, because the president can’t; it’s codified under U.S. law. But there was an effort to poke more holes in it through executive authority than ever before.
The first Trump administration put a lot of that back in the box, so to speak. The Biden administration only tweaked things at the margins. So when this new administration comes in, a lot of the tools from the first Trump administration are still in place.
It’s been somewhat surprising that the administration hasn’t gone after some measures used in more sanctions-forward eras—cutting down flights or creating a new cap on remittances. They haven’t done that. They did slap Cuba back onto the state sponsors of terrorism list, which it had come off for about a minute in the last week of the Biden administration. So it’s almost as if that never happened.
Alexis Madrigal: But what they have done is stop oil—physically stop oil from getting to Cuba. Right?
Michael J. Bustamante: Correct. But that really starts in 2026. Since the operation to remove Nicolás Maduro from power, Cuba was immediately cut off from its most stable and important oil supplier. The Trump administration then threatened tariffs on any other nation that would continue to ship oil to Cuba. That was largely targeted at Mexico, which had emerged as a relatively important supplier.
Right now, Cuba is trying to get by on about 40% of the oil it was consuming prior to January of this year—and that 40% was already a reduced level. In 2025, before this most recent oil cutoff, the Cuban electric grid had already experienced five nationwide blackouts. Things were already really dire, and what’s happened since January has ratcheted that up to a new level.
Alexis Madrigal: Jen, let’s talk about what this means for the Cuban people. We’re talking about blackouts, and if you cut off that much oil, it affects much more than just transportation.
Jen Triplett: Yeah, absolutely. The day-to-day experiences of the Cuban population right now—if we think back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—that was almost a trial run for what’s happening now. Cubans developed a sense of how to improvise, invent, and find solutions.
Those skills are coming to the fore again. When we think about gas, we think about cars, but it also affects electricity. That impacts people from the moment they wake up to when they go to bed.
For example, potable water in many homes is pumped either from the street or from rooftop tanks—those pumps require electricity. There are spillover effects on education, with schools closing and students being sent home because institutions can’t provide for them. And there are serious impacts on the health care sector as well.
Alexis Madrigal: There had also been this kind of gray-market tourism—especially during the warming years of the Obama administration. What’s happened to that sector, which I understand was a pillar of the informal economy?
Jen Triplett: The private sector in Cuba has really been anchored in tourism—restaurants, nightclubs, and housing like bed-and-breakfast setups. Those businesses saw the Obama administration as an opportunity to grow, and there was a large influx of tourists.
Cuba has always had tourism from outside the U.S.—from Canada, Russia, and Europe—but those businesses really began to thrive during that period. Then restrictions were reimposed, including on cruise ships, and COVID was extremely tough. With the closure of José Martí International Airport, tourism basically stopped.
Now, many of those ventures—both state-run and private—that matured around the time of COVID are sitting empty. It’s been a real challenge for entrepreneurs and small business owners to stay open or make improvements.
Alexis Madrigal: Michael, was that collapse in tourism the main reason COVID was so destabilizing for Cuba?
Michael J. Bustamante: COVID was the culmination of a perfect storm. The Cuban economy was already suffering from the rollback of Obama-era openness. U.S. visitor numbers had started to fall, and by 2019 you were already seeing rising shortages.
When Cuba had to close its borders and tourism disappeared overnight, it was crushing. Cuba’s GDP declined by 10% in 2020 alone. And the tourism industry hasn’t recovered, for a few reasons.
One is cost competitiveness—Cuba struggles compared to other Caribbean destinations due to infrastructure challenges. Another is the knock-on effects of being placed back on the state sponsors of terrorism list, which complicates travel for Europeans who need visa waivers to enter the United States.
There’s also an internal story here. While there has been private sector expansion, it’s been inconsistent—one step forward, one step back. The state still frames the private sector as a complement, not an engine of growth. That runs counter to advice from allies like China and Vietnam.
So there’s a story of missed opportunities and uneven reform that has left Cuba particularly vulnerable to external shocks like COVID—or what’s happening now under the Trump administration. But the external pressures matter a great deal, too.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the Trump administration’s policies toward Cuba and how the Cuban people are experiencing the current humanitarian crisis. We’re joined by Michael J. Bustamante of the University of Miami and Jen Triplett of the University of Colorado Boulder.
We’re also taking your questions. It’s a complicated story with a long history, so what are your questions about current U.S. policy toward Cuba? Maybe about the blockade that’s keeping oil out, or maybe you have roots in Cuba—what are your thoughts and reactions?
Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. Email us at forum@kqed.org, or find us on social media—Bluesky, Instagram, Discord—we’re @KQEDForum.
I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.
