Cuba’s Energy Crisis: Can it withstand an oil embargo or does Trump have other plans?

The island country has a history of adopting to embargoes; plus, the casino scenario

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Cuba is known for its love of classic ‘50s-era American cars, known as almendrones — symbols of resilience and Cuban culture. Photo: ChrisGoldNY/flickr.

(Michael Molinski is a senior economist at Trendline Economics. He’s worked for Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Wells Fargo, and previously as a foreign correspondent and editor for Bloomberg News and MarketWatch.)

HAVANA, Cuba (Callaway Climate Insights) — Cuba is undergoing yet another energy crisis inflicted by a foreign power. This time it’s a U.S. embargo on oil shipments, mandated by President Donald Trump. On the surface, it seems Cuba can’t exist without oil. Or can it?

In 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union halted virtually all of Cuba’s oil shipments, I visited a farm outside Havana that was designed to produce energy from pig feces. It was quite astounding. In row after row of pig pens, these sows would do nothing but eat and shit, and their feces entered a system of conveyor belts, which was transported by truck to an energy producer that turned the pig feces into biofuel.

Since then, Cuba has not had to rely so much on biofuel because it found Venezuela to be a willing partner for their “oil-for-doctors” program. Venezuela supplied as much as 60% of Cuba’s energy needs, and Cuba supplied its well-trained supply of doctors to Venezuela.

That all ended when Trump invaded Venezuela and implemented an oil embargo, exerting pressure on countries supplying more than half of the remaining energy to Cuba.

How will Cuba survive without oil?