(DCNF)—Cuba’s communist government confirmed on Friday what many of us predicted months ago: The island nation has officially run out of oil.
On May 14, Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy delivered the stark admission: “We have absolutely no fuel oil, absolutely no diesel.” Blackouts in Havana now exceed 20-22 hours daily, with electricity returning for as little as 90 minutes. Power plants sit idle, reserves are exhausted and the socialist regime’s long-running energy crisis has reached its breaking point.
How did it happen? It wasn’t bad luck or an act of God. It was the direct, deliberate result of the Trump administration’s energy policy and the implementation of what has come to be referred to as the “Donroe Doctrine.”
For decades, Cuba survived on underpriced — sometime even free — Venezuelan crude shipped by the Nicolas Maduro regime in Venezuela. That lifeline ended abruptly in January 2026 when the Trump administration removed Maduro, seized effective control of Venezuela’s oil industry and redirected those resources toward legitimate hemispheric interests.
No more using Venezuelan oil to prop up another failed socialist dictatorship in America’s backyard.
The Trump administration followed with an effective energy blockade. An executive order imposed tariffs on any nation supplying oil to Cuba, effectively slamming the door on workarounds from Mexico and elsewhere. Cuba’s domestic production, always minimal and hampered by decades of mismanagement, couldn’t begin to fill the gap.
Crumbling Soviet-era infrastructure, already began to collapse under the strain. President Donald Trump followed up with additional sanctions targeting the Cuban regime on May 1. The regime’s own mismanagement, corruption and refusal to embrace market reforms sealed the deal.
Some critics have called this cruelty, but what it really amounts to is strategic realism. Previous U.S. administrations allowed Cuba to leech off other people’s energy while exporting repression, doctors-for-hire schemes and anti-American influence throughout Latin America. The Donroe Doctrine ended that era of weakness.
It reasserts American primacy in the Western Hemisphere, expels Chinese, Russian and Iranian footholds, and secures reliable supply chains under U.S. leadership. Energy dominance isn’t just about American shale and LNG exports: It’s about geopolitical leverage.
What happens next? The regime is already blinking. Not-so-secret negotiations between Havana and Washington have been underway for weeks. The Cuban government itself announced that CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Havana this week.
Cuba’s goal is simple: Lift the blockade and restore the flow of cheap foreign oil. America’s goal is transformative: force the regime to loosen its stranglehold on the economy, end political repression, and move toward real reform that could enable the long-repressed nation to move into the modern world.
The U.S. leverage is enormous. With hospitals running on generators (when they have fuel), food spoiling, water systems failing and the private sector gasping for air, the pressure is mounting.
Protests are bubbling up. The regime knows it cannot sustain this indefinitely without serious concessions.
For America First advocates, this moment represents a historic opportunity. A post-Castro Cuba aligned with free markets and U.S. interests could become a prosperous partner rather than the perpetual headache it has represented across the last 67 years. It would deny adversaries a platform in our hemisphere and open new avenues for American energy and investment.
Critics will decry the “humanitarian crisis,” ignoring that the true humanitarian disaster has been suffering under the yoke of communism for 2/3rds of a century. The Cuban people have suffered under rationing, repression and poverty not because of U.S. policy, but because their government chose ideology over results.
Socialism always runs out of other people’s money – and oil, as it turns out – eventually. The Donroe Doctrine simply sped up the inevitable.
President Trump has made clear his intent to expel the Chinese/Russian influence from the Western Hemisphere. The Donroe Doctrine puts American security, prosperity and dominance first.
Cuba’s oil collapse is painful proof that the policy works. The coming weeks and months will test whether the regime chooses survival through reform or doubles down on failure.
One thing is certain: the lights may be out across Havana today, but the path to a brighter future for the Cuban people has never been clearer. Energy dominance delivered the pressure.
U.S. pressure and diplomacy can now deliver the change. Like it or not, The Donroe Doctrine is rewriting the future of the Americas.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
