Following intense pressure from the U.S., Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has stopped the sale of oil to the island dictatorship.
She defending the move as a “sovereign decision” while withstanding pressure from far left members of her party.
Since Washington captured Venezuela's Nicholas Maduro, oil shipments from Venezuela to Cuba have drastically decreased, leaving Mexico as Havana's biggest crude supplier.
Cuba is in the midst of its worst economic crisis in a generation compounded by plummeting tourist numbers also the result of U.S. pressure.
Tourism in Cuba is plummeting at a time when the island desperately needs that revenue, with the number of visitors dropping by more than half since 2018. For almost two decades, a steady stream of visitors sparked a boom in tourism, only for the COVID-19 pandemic and severe blackouts to hit, coupled with increased U.S. sanctions.
Humberto Fontova is an author and Latin American expert, who escaped Fidel Castro's Cuban regime in 1961. He thinks the regime's days could be numbered.
"As long as those petroleum shipments were coming from Mexico, they were not numbered. But did they stop from Mexico? That's it. There's nobody in any position. There won't be anything rapid, it will be a slow strangulation of the regime.”
Next steps from inside the regime are predictable, Fontova said.
“They are searching for a mole in the Cuban regime similar to the one we had in the Venezuelan regime. Then we could flip them.”
If the Cuban government truly falls, there’s a ready-made base of economic investment ready for new leadership on the island.
“We’ve got a lot of people in South Florida, businessmen primarily that are more than willing to go back to their homeland to invest when they see a return on that investment. But we've got to clean house of the commies at the very top."
