Cuban leadership hopes its announced reforms will buy it time with the US

The U.S. State Department this week denied that the Florida-based company Vanguard Energy had received authorization to export gasoline and diesel to Cuba, dashing hopes that the island would receive about 250,000 barrels of fuel to ease the severe energy shortages that get worse every day.

Washington’s decision is further evidence that tension between the two countries has not eased since January, when U.S. President Donald Trump launched a series of measures that have worsened an already serious economic crisis on the island. Many people now wonder whether the situation will change once the economic reforms announced last Friday by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel begin to take effect.

On January 29, Trump signed an order to impose sanctions and tariffs on countries that supply fuel to Cuba, effectively creating an energy embargo. Since then, he has sanctioned a range of entities and individuals linked to the regime, including the military-business conglomerate Gaesa, which manages 40% of the productive sectors.

The prospect of coming under intensified U.S. scrutiny as a result of those sanctions has triggered a flight of foreign companies from the tourism sector, the backbone of the economy. Completing electronic or credit-card transactions on the island has also become problematic.

In that emergency context, Cubans remain on edge: will the package of economic reforms help facilitate negotiations with Trump, or is it merely a stopgap the Cuban regime hopes will buy it time? In a meeting with journalists, Díaz-Canel announced about 20 measures to expand private-sector participation, reduce bureaucratic hurdles and grant a degree of autonomy to state enterprises.

“They have left a little door open,” said Pavel Vidal, who holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Havana and now teaches in Colombia. He said academic colleagues still living in Havana have greeted the announcements cautiously, though they sense a level of openness they have not seen before in the island’s doctrinaire socialist leadership.

“There is something new. There is a greater willingness to change, to implement some reforms they never wanted to introduce. Another question is whether these changes will lead to a lifting of sanctions, and what that would entail: whether they will be sufficient for the United States to advance negotiations,” added Vidal, a former official at the Central Bank of Cuba.

News of reforms in Cuba arrived as U.S. President Trump proclaimed he was close to finalizing a deal with Iran to end that conflict. The Republican has said in the past that once the Iran matter is closed, Cuba “will be next.”

In that vein, the White House has promised a Venezuelan-style formula adapted to the Cuban reality, based on an economic tutelage system directed from Washington. That campaign has intensified since January, after the military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The State Department in Washington did not respond to this newspaper’s request for comment on the reform package.

Rising pressure

In recent weeks, the Justice Department has charged the regime’s strongman, Raúl Castro, with four counts of murder, among other charges, in connection with the 1996 downing of a plane belonging to the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue in international waters. Washington has also expanded its web of financial and commercial blockades, further isolating the Caribbean economy, which suffers daily blackouts, transportation failures, food shortages and industrial collapse.

The Miami-Dade County Tax Collector’s Office in Florida revoked Vanguard Energy’s business tax receipt on Thursday, stripping the company of the legal right to operate in its jurisdiction after the firm announced plans to ship fuel to Cuba in an operation that would link it to the sanctioned state oil company CUPET. “Miami-Dade County will not serve as a base of operations for activities that undermine federal law or support the Cuban dictatorship,” said county tax collector Dariel Fernández in a statement.

According to the office, Vanguard said it had signed a contract with a Cuban importing agency to lease CUPET fuel storage facilities and planned to send gasoline and diesel to Cuba on tankers for distribution on the island. The same report included a statement from the U.S. State Department saying Vanguard Energy had not received any license for the transaction and that the sanctions remain in effect.

The decision came the same day Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions against the oil company. Rubio, who is a son of Cuban immigrants, has built his political career opposing the Castro regime —which he calls “incompetent”—and blaming it for the island’s severe problems. The last major delivery of crude to the island took place in late March, when a Russian tanker dispatched roughly 730,000 barrels of oil with Trump’s permission.

Despite everything, the U.S. government continues to hold talks with regime representatives, including Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Rodríguez Castro, about whom few details have been made public. Last month, CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a surprise trip to Havana to meet, among others, Rodríguez Castro and the head of Cuba’s intelligence services a few days before the indictment against the former president. According to the CIA at the time, he carried a message from Trump himself: that the United States was willing to help the country emerge from the crisis—to which it has contributed heavily—but only in exchange for “meaningful” economic and political reforms.

Trump has at times flirted with the idea of “taking Cuba.” But Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said after a White House meeting that the U.S. president had told him he did not intend to invade the island.

“They want to demoralize and divide the regime,” José Cárdenas, a partner at the lobbying firm Cormac Group, said this week during a forum organized by the think tank Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. “They will want to create splits among leaders, appeal to those who believe they can have a life after change, and see what happens.”

“This administration is increasing pressure on the Cuban government to carry out changes beyond cosmetic tweaks in the economy and politics. The interesting thing is how that strategy is implemented, with both carrots and sticks. If a clear strategy is applied and those incentives are structured correctly, there may be a path to significant change. If there are only punishments, the result may not be politically viable,” warned Ricardo Torres of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University at the same forum.

On the changes the United States might impose, Torres added: “Many Cubans these days are willing to accept things they would not have accepted in the past, simply because they want a change that, unfortunately, the Cuban government has been unable to deliver.”

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