A tanker carrying fuel originally bound for Cuba on Friday changed its destination to Trinidad and Tobago, according to LSEG ship-tracking data, a blow for the island amid a severe fuel scarcity that has triggered power blackouts. The Hong Kong-flagged vessel Sea Horse loaded a Russian diesel cargo earlier this year through a ship-to-ship transfer in the Mediterranean before setting sail to the Caribbean.
But while the Russian-origined cargo was bound for Cuba, the ship had suspended course in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean since late February. And according to LSEG data, the tanker has now changed course and is heading south to Trinidad, with an estimated arrival on Monday, leaving Cuba with no immediate supplies in sight.
Cuba on Tuesday reconnected its power grid and brought online its largest thermal electricity plant, ending a nationwide blackout that lasted more than 29 hours. But the US move to choke off fuel supply to Cuba’s government could cause more outages, Cuban officials have said. Sure enough, over the weekend, the island nation suffered another countrywide blackout.
The US Treasury Department on Thursday changed the terms of a waiver it had granted to sales of Russian-origin crude and petroleum products already loaded on tankers to specifically exclude transactions involving North Korea, Cuba and Crimea, in order to put the squeeze on Cuba which Trump has threatened to take over.
While the Trump administration wants to contain high crude and gas prices amid the Middle East conflict, it has not eased pressure on the island’s Communist government, restricting any oil supplies to private entities only.
While the Hong Kong-flagged Sea Horse tanker may have given up on its Cuban delivery, another Russian tanker is now powering across the Atlantic and could soon become the first real test of how far the Kremlin is willing to go to aid its old allies in Cuba amid the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Havana.
The Russian-flagged, state-owned tanker the Anatoly Kolodkin departed March 8 from Primorsk, Russia, carrying 750,000 barrels of crude that, once refined, could provide Cuba with several precious weeks of energy. Britain’s Royal Navy tracked the ship and its Russian naval escort through the English Channel. Then the escort veered off and the vessel continued its journey solo.
The Kolodkin’s destination is listed on manifests only as “Atlantic, For Order.” But the maritime tracking agency Vortexa indicates the Cuban port of Matanzas, home to the island’s largest oil terminal, as the most likely destination, according to Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a senior analyst at the maritime intelligence firm Windward, Vortexa’s partner. Other firms have also reported the ship appears to be heading to Cuba. It’s about a week away from the island, Bockmann said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t confirm or deny Moscow’s links to the Kolodkin or another ship carrying Russian oil in the Atlantic on Friday. But he suggested Moscow was looking for ways to offer Cuba relief. Russia’s state-run TASS news agency also said this week the Russian government is in talks with Cuba about aid options, without providing further details.
The Russian government is “in constant contact with the Cuban leadership, with our Cuban friends,” Peskov said. “And we are, indeed, discussing with them possible options for assisting Cuba in the difficult situation it finds itself in.”
Any attempt to deliver crude to Cuba could trigger a direct confrontation with an administration with which Moscow has been eager to build a new working relationship. Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department, looking to ease the surge in energy prices caused by the war in Iran, temporarily lifted sanctions on countries that purchased Russian oil then already at sea. But on Thursday, Treasury issued new guidance that specifically barred Cuba from receiving Russian oil, a move that appeared to send an unsubtle message to Moscow: Back off.
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the question of how and whether to aid Cuba these days is perhaps more about optics. After the U.S. extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, and the subsequent pivot of his authoritarian socialist regime toward Washington, Russia is now left with very few friends in the Americas. Russia in 2024 sent warships, including the frigate Admiral Gorshkov and the nuclear submarine Kazan, on port visits to Havana to project power in the region. Last year, Havana and Moscow signed a military cooperation agreement that includes joint military drills, training and the refurbishment of Cuban military equipment.
But Cuba has never truly regained the strategic importance to Moscow it enjoyed during the Cold War. More at stake for the Kremlin now is defending the value of Russian friendship, which has been brought into question by Moscow’s muted support for its beleaguered allies in Venezuela and Iran.
“Russia has been seriously hurt by its lack of willingness to defend Maduro at all, and playing not a visible role in the Iran conflict,” said Douglas Farah, president of the national security consulting firm IBI Consultants. “If they feel they can get away with [shipping oil to Cuba], they would probably love to.”
But Moscow is mostly “probing the strength of American will,” he said, and will change course if confronted. “I seriously doubt, even with the U.S. being very distracted in Iran, that Russia would test the military resolve of the United States, especially given Trump’s, you know, ongoing behavior.”
Power blackouts are now the norm in Cuba, which has received only two tankers at its ports this year bringing imported oil cargoes, LSEG data showed. The Caribbean country needs imported fuel oil and diesel to generate power and avoid more outages, while gasoline sales remain strictly rationed and sold on the black market for $8 per liter, six times the official price.
Trinidad’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar told parliament last week there was interest, including from the U.S., in using the twin-island country’s idled refinery and tank infrastructure for oil storage.
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.
