CBS News' Matt Gutman breaks down the worsening conditions in Cuba as U.S. sanctions contribute to deteriorating circumstances.
Page A214From§Eachthe morning edition — 16 October 2026
U.S. cuts Cuba's fuel in January, runs a $100 million hearts-and-minds program there by September
As it ran on the front
You will be told the embargo has failed. Sixty-seven years of it, and the government it was written against is still standing, so the thing is a ruin. Do not mistake me. Nothing here has broken. It was drafted to deny one island hard currency and fuel, and against that specification it performs ... quite exquisitely. Sixty-seven years. Sixty-seven.
In January the fuel shipments stopped. And what travels the other way? A hundred million dollars, Marco Rubio's programme, for hearts and minds on the island, reported the tenth of September. A hundred million for the hearts, and no fuel for the houses.…
…(cont) Forty-five groups wrote to Hakeem Jeffries on the ninth of September asking the House to vote on the war powers resolution covering the de facto oil embargo. The House has not voted. The caucus is divided over squeezing harder.
Carlos Fernández de Cossío says the aim is to "asphyxiate the people of Cuba into submission." The grid goes down and comes back and goes down. That is the instrument working.
The well, they capped. The rope a man keeps, coiled, not yet thrown.
“They shut off an island's fuel in January, the grid collapses half a dozen times by September, and then somebody wires a hundred million dollars to win over the hearts of people sitting in the heat with no refrigerator. Sixty-seven years in and they still call this unfinished business, like the squeezing is a bug. The money for the charm offensive exists; the money was never the problem, and the people blacked out in Havana are not a side effect, they are the lever.”
“The sanctions are targeted — targeted at the regime, not the people, and the bank is state-run, so technically that is the regime. Did I say the bank clears everything? That does not sound like me. And look, a hundred million dollars in humanitarian outreach tells you exactly where our heart is, so if the lights are out, that is a grid-maintenance story in Havana, not a Washington story.”
The receipts
The U.S. blockade of oil imports to Cuba has been blamed for a worsening economic and humanitarian crisis. The Trump administration is targeting Cuba's communist government, imposing new sanctions against Cuba's state-run bank.
Intensifying efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to end 67 years of communist rule in Cuba are drawing fierce criticism from many congressional Democrats. But not all. Since Fidel Castro seized power in the 1959 Cuban revolution, the country has been a preeminent cause célèbre for the global Left.
· Cuba: The “Pandora’s Box” of US Humanitarian Assistance from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
· End Trump Oil Embargo on Cuba With War Powers Vote, Coalition Urges House Democrats from the morgue, 12 Sep 2026
· Could Cuba Become a "Silent Gaza"? U.S. Fuel Blockade Aims to "Asphyxiate" Island: Top Cuban Diplomat from the morgue, 22 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.