Creating the Crisis, Claiming the Cure
January 16, 2026
Donald Trump invented a drug cartel to justify abducting Venezuela’s president so U.S. oil companies could get back into the country. The irony is that his own sanctions were a reason they were forced out in the first place.
“We left under the sanctions in 2019,” Halliburton CEO Jeff Miller told Trump at a gathering of oil executives at the White House on Friday. “We had intended to stay, and then when the sanctions went into place, we were required to leave.”
Trump began imposing new sanctions on Venezuela in 2017 and strengthened them in 2019, leading to a decline in average caloric consumption among Venezuelans, rising rates of illness and death, and the displacement of millions due to deteriorating economic conditions, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Cuba was being squeezed at the same time. Sanctions drove out U.S. companies, destroyed the economy, impoverished the population and pushed more than a million Cubans to migrate to the United States. Now, Trump is claiming Cuba is on the verge of collapse, but his own policies have created the very crisis that is being used to justify Washington’s calls for regime change.
"I have a future here"... then Trump won
Despite the history of acrimony between the two countries, Cuba has long shown a desire to normalize relations. Just over a decade ago, in December 2014, the two countries began doing just that after Barack Obama and Raúl Castro brokered a historic detente. The countries “re-established diplomatic relations,” and Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba since 1928.
The deal brought in both U.S. companies and visitors to the island, boosting the economy and giving many Cubans hope for a better future.
"I hardly had time to rest," Havana taxi driver Oscar Álvarez told Belly of the Beast. "We picked up passengers at the cruise ship terminal, and we didn’t stop all day."
“Havana was overcrowded: celebrities, musicians, politicians — everybody. Chanel runway, Fast and Furious shooting, Rolling Stones concert,” Cuban fashion designer Idania del Río told journalist Liz Oliva Fernández in our documentary series The War on Cuba. “The mood was ‘anything is possible,’ all this sense of change, and finally to be aware of: ‘I have a future here. I can stay here. I don’t have to leave my country.’ But then Trump won the election.”
Since 2017, Cuba has been subject to a barrage of “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed by Trump and largely kept in place by Joe Biden. Some of the measures, like the 2019 U.S. ban on cruise ship visits, battered Cuba’s economy and the fledgling private sector.
"You could really see the difference when the American cruise ships stopped," said Álvarez. "They left a big hole, and not just for us. They gave life to the whole city."
Now, after forcing U.S. companies out of Cuba just like he did with Venezuela — and blocking all shipments of Venezuelan oil to the island — Trump has warned that Cuba is about to collapse and better make a deal “BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
“We’re talking to Cuba, and you’ll find out pretty soon,” he told reporters Sunday on Air Force One. Cuba on Monday denied any negotiations were underway.
What would a Trump deal with Cuba look like?
It’s not clear whether Trump’s endgame in Cuba is wholesale political change, which has long been Washington’s take-it-or-leave-it approach, or striking a deal that opens the island to U.S. companies while leaving the political system intact, as he did with Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez.
Marco Rubio and his fellow hardliners have not been subtle about their aspirations for Cuba. Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL) last week posted a map on X, showing U.S. company logos scattered across the island with the accompanying text: “POV: Cuba soon.” He wrote: “When the inevitable happens in #Cuba & the narcoterrorist dictatorship is no more, there won’t be a company that won’t want to invest in the stunning, beautiful island of my birth."
Fact check: Far from a “narcoterrorist dictatorship,” Cuba is arguably the U.S. government’s most reliable security partner in the Caribbean. See Liz Oliva Fernández’s report on Cuba’s counternarcotics efforts.
While Cuban-American hardliners have long salivated at the prospect of the U.S. recolonizing Cuba, Trump in the past seemed interested in investing in the island without regime change. In 2008, Trump’s brand name was registered with Cuba’s Office of Industrial Property for hotels, casinos, beauty contests, television programs and golf courses. And Trump Organization executives have visited Cuba on different occasions, smoking cigars, playing golf and scoping out business opportunities.
“Trump does not have a principled opposition to Cuban socialism,” said William LeoGrande, professor of government at American University. “He was willing to go and work with the socialist government of Cuba to build a hotel and a casino.”
Trump endorsed Obama’s detente in March 2016. “After 50 years, it’s enough time, folks,” he said at a Republican primary debate in which he faced off against Rubio, then a senator.
But after winning the presidential primary, Trump cut a deal with Rubio, getting his support both in Florida and in the Senate in exchange for endorsing Rubio’s hard-line policy toward Cuba.
Trump, who once called Rubio a “lightweight choker” and “corrupt politician,” now seems intent on making him and his Cuban-American allies happy.
When a reporter asked Trump on Sunday what kind of deal he was looking for with Cuba, he responded: “One of the groups I want taken care of are the people that came from Cuba that were forced out or left under duress.”