Trump tries to wreck Cuba-Mexico alliance

US president Donald Trump is determined to starve Cuba of oil in his bid for control of the Western hemisphere. Cuba buys oil from Mexico despite heavy US sanctions. Now Trump is threatening to hit Mexico with tariffs.

Trump has also been channeling a mix of Cold War and War on Terror rhetoric to justify himself. He’s accused Cuba of hosting Russian spies AND Hamas and Hezbollah agents. Any one will do, right?

Trump increasing belligerence

The New York Times reported that although Trump did not name the US’s southern neighbour:

The threat seemed to be directed at Mexico, one of the few countries still delivering oil to Cuba. Earlier this month, he even said that he had specifically asked President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico to cut off its supply.

Mexico is a key regional ally of the Cuban government:

Mexico and Cuba’s long alliance — rooted in economic and cultural cooperation and a shared wariness of U.S. intervention — survived and even deepened after the Cuban Revolution, when Mexico preserved ties with Havana even as much of the region aligned with Washington.

And Mexico has been juggling the alliance amid Trump’s increased belligerence. No oil has been sent since January, but the Mexican navy delivered humanitarian aid.

Sheinbaum told reporters on 9 February:

No one can ignore the situation that the Cuban people are currently experiencing because of the sanctions that the United States is imposing in a very unfair manner.

Trump has threatened to hit targets in Mexico under the guise of his pseudo-war on drugs. This is the same rationale he has used to airstrike small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific since September 2025. And the same rationale he used to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on 3 January 2026.

Anti-communism

Trump is no more a fan of having a ‘communist’ nation close by than any other US leader. But his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban refugees, is even more neurotically anti-Cuba.

The Cuban ambassador to the UN Ernesto Soberón Guzmán laid into Rubio in a Newsweek interview on 7 February:

What is clear to me is that Rubio has never come to Cuba, and he’s talking about something he knows nothing about.

He said Rubio’s position was contradictory because of how own family had fled the pre-Castro US-backed regime:

His parents came to the United States before the revolution. It’s false this image people have that they came to the United States running away from the revolution.

They came to the United States fleeing the dictatorship that existed in Cuba, which was supported by the U.S. government at the time, under [then Cuban President Fulgencio] Batista.

Guzman suspected Cuba lived rent-free in Rubio’s head:

Whether it’s harmful or not, whether it’s clinically harmful or not, whether it’s clinically proven, that’s something you have to find out as a journalist.

But there is a also bigger geopolitical picture beyond the contents of Rubio’s brain.

The bigger picture

Oil politics and the personal obsessions of Trump’s goons clearly play a part in the current situation. It’s also important to recall Cuba was effectively the first colony in what would become the US’s global empire. And US policy now has reverted in some ways to the gunboat diplomacy of an era which saw the US attack Cuba, the Philippines, and China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) demands control of the hemisphere. In some ways, this is a return to the old Monroe Doctrine which helped drive US empire building in the first place.

The NSS asserts:

The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.

For the US, is it ‘our way or the highway’ on the American continent. Or rather: our way or you’ll be starved, shot, drone-struck, and/or kidnapped into submission.

Accusations about foreign influence in Cuba echo the NSS precisely:

Some foreign influence will be hard to reverse, given the political alignments between certain Latin American governments and certain foreign actors.

And at the heart of US strategy, as ever, are the demands of the American market:

The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world.

The Trump administration is driven by greed, ego, and a yearning for hegemony. This isn’t so different from its predecessors, Trump and his lackeys are just more open about it. What is different is that the US empire’s decline is rapidly turning into a freefall. And a wounded beast is a dangerous thing, as Cubans and Mexicans are well aware.

Featured image via the Canary