And I was watching an interview with a representative of the Cuban Foreign Ministry the other day, and they looked into the camera and said something that has made me think. They invited the reporter to go out into the streets of Havana. ‘Look around’, he said. ‘See for yourself. Does this look like a country on the verge of collapse?’
The reporter agreed. It didn’t.
And yet, for three months, Cuba received no oil. Not one singular drop. Since January, when the United States kidnapped Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro from his home, the pipeline that kept Cuba running was severed. The US then threatened tariffs on any country that dared to sell fuel to the island. Mexico, which had been sending oil in solidarity, stopped. The message from Washington was clear: starve them, break them, make them beg.
And then this week saw a Russian tanker called the Anatoly Kolodkin docking at the port of Matanzas, carrying 730,000 barrels of crude oil. The White House says it ‘allowed’ this shipment through. The word ‘allowed’ is doing some truly Olympic-level heavy lifting there. The United States, which has two Coast Guard cutters in the region that could have intercepted the tanker, chose not to, and not because it wanted to be kind, but because it was in no position to start a fight with Russia while its fleet is already stretched thin bombing Iran.

Crosspost from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11202525