Cuba’s government has announced that it has run out of oil. On Wednesday night, Cuba’s energy minister Vicente de La O Levy said that the country has completely run out of diesel and fuel oil, and that the national grid is in a “critical” state. He further described how in the capital city of Havana, “the blackouts today exceed 20 or 22 hours.” “The situation is very tense…
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US surveillance and reconnaissance flights off the coast of Cuba have surged in recent months as President Donald Trump has issued increasingly belligerent threats to seize the island nation by force. CNN reported Sunday that the U.S. Navy and Air Force have conducted more than two dozen surveillance flights — mostly of them near Havana and Santiago de Cuba, the country’s largest cities…
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 11, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
US surveillance and reconnaissance flights off the coast of Cuba have surged in recent months as President Donald Trump has issued increasingly belligerent threats to seize the island nation by force.
CNN reported Sunday that the US Navy and Air Force have conducted more than two dozen surveillance flights—mostly of them near Havana and Santiago de Cuba, the country’s largest cities—since early February, after the Trump administration invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. The outlet noted that “similar patterns, in which ramped-up rhetoric by the Trump administration coincided with an uptick in publicly visible surveillance flights, occurred in the lead-up to US military operations in both Venezuela and Iran.”
“The flights are notable not only for their proximity to the coast, which puts them well within range of gathering intelligence, but for the suddenness of their appearance—prior to February, such publicly visible flights were exceedingly rare in this area—and for their timing,” CNN reported.
CNN published its story days after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions targeting a conglomerate operated by Cuba’s military and a natural resources firm, intensifying the United States’ decades-long economic war against the island nation.
“Our people already know the cruelty behind the actions of the US government and the viciousness with which it is capable of attacking us,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in response to the sanctions. “They understand, just as the rest of the world does, that this is a unilateral aggression against a nation and a population whose sole ambition is to live in peace, masters of their own destiny and free from the pernicious interference of US imperialism.”
In a New York Times op-ed on Monday, US Reps. Pramila
President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez of Cuba on Saturday responded with stark and defiant words to the latest attacks coming from U.S. President Donald Trump, who on Friday signed a new executive order authorizing even more aggressive sanctions against the island nation and later threatened to invade the country. “The President of the United States escalates his threats of military aggression…
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The U.S. Senate on Tuesday defeated a Democrat-led bid to stop President Donald Trump from following through on his threat to wage war on Cuba, whose long-suffering people are reeling from the American administration’s tightened economic stranglehold. Upper chamber lawmakers voted 51-47 on a procedural motion to block further debate Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D-Virginia) SJ Res. 124…
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Even with its hands full in an unpopular, costly and deadly war in Iran, the Trump administration seems to be ramping up preparations for military action in Cuba following weeks of relative calm between the two countries. On Tuesday, news outlet Zeteo reported that “officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the U.S. government were quietly given a new directive that came straight from the…
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