In Cuba, the lights went out Thursday morning. The national grid collapsed across Cuba’s eastern provinces, from Guantánamo through the center of the island. Cuba’s Energy Minister had appeared on state television the day before to admit the island had “absolutely no fuel, and absolutely no diesel. We have no reserves.” On Wednesday night, AP journalists watched residents bang pots and pans and set fire to trash cans in the dark.

Two days earlier, on the way to Beijing for the state visit I wrote about Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio boarded Air Force One in a gray Nike tracksuit. The internet called it “the Maduro fit” inside an hour. The joke was real. So was the message.

The Cuban-American Secretary of State wore Maduro’s clothes to China while Havana sat in the dark. That was not a coincidence. That was a postcard to the Castro family.

Four moves in 48 hours

The United States stacked four moves in two days. They read as one message to the Castros: easy way or hard way, but pick a way.

First, the Justice Department moved to indict Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba and brother of Fidel. The case turns on Cuba’s 1996 shootdown of two unarmed Cessnas operated by the humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue. Four Americans died over international waters that day. An audio recording, obtained in 2006 by El Nuevo Herald, Miami’s Spanish-language Cuban-exile paper, captured Raúl Castro telling his pilots to “knock them down over [Cuban] territory” and “knock them down into the sea when they reappear.”

Second, CIA Director John Ratcliffe landed in Havana on Thursday. He met Raúl Rodríguez Castro, a colonel in Cuba’s Interior Ministry who has spent more than a decade as his grandfather’s bodyguard and gatekeeper. Known as “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), Rodríguez Castro is the regime’s point of contact with Washington. Cuba’s interior minister and intelligence chief were at the table too. Ratcliffe delivered Trump’s message in plain terms: the United States is “prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.” A CIA official added that “the opportunity would not remain open indefinitely” and that the administration would enforce “red lines.”

Third, the State Department offered $100 million in humanitarian aid, distributed through the Catholic Church and other independent organizations. The Cuban embassy in Washington hedged on whether to accept it.

Fourth, the tracksuit. He chose his clothes that morning.

The Venezuela template

We know the playbook works because we just ran it.

On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces hit Maduro’s compound in downtown Caracas at 2 a.m. local time. Operation Absolute Resolve involved more than 150 aircraft from 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere. Delta Force kicked the door. Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured and flown to a Manhattan federal courthouse, where they were arraigned on January 5 in front of Judge Alvin Hellerstein on drug trafficking and terrorism charges.

The U.S. installed Maduro’s own former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, as interim president of Venezuela. Ratcliffe flew to Caracas to meet her on January 15 with the same script he just used in Havana.

Then came the uranium. Between April 18 and 29, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration removed 30 pounds of highly enriched uranium from RV-1, Venezuela’s nuclear research reactor. The material was hauled overland to a Venezuelan port and shipped to a federal nuclear-materials facility in South Carolina. The job took six weeks.

The Trump administration framed the uranium operation as Phase Two of a three-part plan for Venezuela. Phase One was the regime. Phase Three is locking down the new government. The same plan is now running on Cuba.

What the regime cannot pay for

The Cuba side of the leverage is simple. The regime cannot keep the lights on.

Cuba produces about 40 percent of the fuel it needs to power its own economy. The rest came from Venezuela until that pipeline went into a Manhattan courtroom. A Russian tanker that left a Baltic port in January is still stuck somewhere in the Atlantic. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is sending humanitarian aid but not oil. She says Russia is delivering the oil. Russia is not.

Power outages in Havana stretched to 24 consecutive hours on Thursday. The eastern grid collapsed that same morning. Wednesday night, residents in numerous neighborhoods banged pots and set fire to trash cans to protest the blackouts. The regime cannot pay its officers, cannot keep its grid running, cannot feed its people, and cannot import a tanker of diesel. Every move Washington made this week was designed to confirm that.

The progressive Havana gift

The American left has been writing love letters to Havana for sixty years. It has never stopped.

In 1989, Bernie Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, took an eight-day trip to Cuba and came back calling the Castro revolution “more profound than I had understood it to be.” In 2020, on 60 Minutes, Sanders praised Fidel Castro’s “massive literacy program” and said it was “unfair to simply say everything is bad” about the regime. In 2007, Michael Moore took 9/11 first responders to a Havana hospital in Sicko and marveled at the care. He filmed in a foreigners-only ward. Regular Cubans use a different hospital system, and that system has been collapsing for a decade.

In early April, Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan Jackson traveled to Havana, met Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and called the U.S. position “cruel collective punishment—effectively an economic bombing of the infrastructure of the country.” By her own admission a month later, Jayapal had been working with foreign ambassadors, including Mexico’s, to help Havana secure oil around the U.S. embargo. A sitting member of Congress was brokering oil for a sanctioned communist regime 90 miles from Florida.

The Senate caught up on April 28. Tim Kaine, Adam Schiff, and Ruben Gallego forced a war powers vote to block any U.S. military action in Cuba. Republicans killed it 51-47. Susan Collins and Rand Paul broke with the GOP to advance the measure. John Fetterman was the only Democrat who voted to block it.

The pattern is older than any current senator. It is the same pattern that produced Sanders’s revolution-tourism in 1989 and Moore’s staged hospital in 2007 and Jayapal’s ambassador-shopping in 2026. And the Democrats’ imagination is wrong on every point. Cuba is a communist nightmare where people have died and fled for generations. Bernie Sanders is wrong: it is all bad.

The Castros broke Cuba

The progressive line is that American sanctions are starving Cuba. The progressive line is wrong.

Cuba was once a wealthy island. Before the revolution it had a literate population, a middle class, a thriving sugar industry, and one of the strongest economies in Latin America. Then came socialism. Sixty-seven years later, the doctors are gone, the medicine shelves are empty, the sugar harvest has collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of Cubans have walked off the island in the last five years alone.

Venezuela ran the same script. A generation ago, it had vast oil reserves and one of the highest incomes in South America. Then came Chávez. Then came Maduro. Now Caracas exports refugees and rebar.

The premature babies in the incubators that Jayapal saw, the cancer patients without medicine, the families cooking over charcoal, the food spoiling in dead refrigerators — those are not the results of an American oil embargo that started months ago. Those are the results of sixty-seven years of communist mismanagement. The Castros did this. They starved their own people. They jailed dissidents. They put rafters at the bottom of the Florida Straits. They shot down two unarmed Cessnas full of humanitarian volunteers and bragged about it on tape.

The Castros are tin-pot dictators. Their crimes against the Cuban people are the indictment. The 1996 charges are just the part that finally catches them in a federal courtroom.

The grandson picks the exit

Ratcliffe did not meet Raúl. He met the grandson.

The 94-year-old defendant in a federal indictment does not decide. El Cangrejo decides. His father ran GAESA, the Cuban military’s business empire, until his death in 2022. His grandfather is about to be charged in an American court for ordering the murder of four Americans. The dynasty is running out of road.

Neither Russia nor China can supply Cuba. Mexico is sending food, not fuel.

The phone in Havana is ringing. Rubio is on the other end. He wore Maduro’s clothes to China to make sure Havana knew it was him.

Take the aid. Take the exit. Or take what Maduro took. There is no third door. The time for Cuba libre is now.