If Their System Is So Bad, Why Won't You Let It Fail?
Watch the clip above. Then read this. Because what Rubio just said deserves a full autopsy.
Marco Rubio stood at the White House podium this week — guest-hosting the press briefing, calm, professorial, confident — and delivered what sounded like a reasonable explanation of Cuba’s energy crisis.
There’s no oil blockade, he said. Venezuela just stopped giving Cuba free oil. Cuba’s regime is incompetent. Their economic model doesn’t work. Nothing to see here.
Every single part of that argument has a hole in it. And underneath all of it sits a question that no politician in Washington wants to answer honestly:
If Cuba’s system is such a catastrophic failure — if it’s so obviously broken — why does the United States spend decades of foreign policy, billions of dollars, and now military force trying to destroy it? Why not just step back and let it fall on its own?
Sit with that. Because it dismantles the whole official story.
Let’s Dismantle What Rubio Actually Said. Line by Line.
He said: “There’s no oil blockade on Cuba, per se.”
Here’s what actually happened. The United States began blocking oil tankers heading to Cuba in February 2026, targeting companies like Mexico’s state-owned Pemex and threatening entire countries with tariffs if they sent a drop of oil to the island. According to the New York Times, this is America’s first effective blockade of Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Trump himself posted it in all caps on Truth Social: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA — ZERO.”
That is not a market outcome. That is a policy decision with an executive order attached — one Rubio helped write. Calling it “no blockade” because you used tariff threats instead of warships is a lawyer’s trick, not an honest description of what is happening to 11 million people.
He said: “Venezuela just decided to stop giving Cuba free oil.”
This is the sleekest part of the deception because it leans on a half-truth. Yes, Venezuela subsidized Cuba’s oil for decades. But Rubio leaves out the part where U.S. military forces captured Venezuela’s president in January 2026 and took control of Venezuela’s oil industry. Venezuela didn’t freely “decide” anything. Its government was removed by Washington. Rubio is blaming the consequence of his own policy and dressing it up as economics.
He said: “Their economic model doesn’t work. They’re incompetent communists.”
Set aside the label for a second and look at what is actually happening on the ground — because that’s what matters.
Families across Cuba are cooking with wood and coal because there is no gas. Power outages run more than 20 hours a day in some provinces. Surgeries have been canceled. Five million Cubans with chronic illnesses are at risk because their treatments depend on electricity that no longer reliably exists. A retired teacher named Maria Elena Rodríguez, who lived through the economic collapse after the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s, said she has never seen anything like this. “Things were very hard in the 90s. We struggled for food and transport. But at least medicines were available.”
The UN Secretary-General warned the situation could fully “collapse” if Cuba’s oil needs go unmet. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated plainly: “Policy goals cannot justify actions that in themselves violate human rights.”
Rubio’s response to all of this is a semantic shrug and a sharp punchline about incompetent communists.
That’s not analysis. That’s a performance.
Now for the Question Nobody in Washington Will Answer
The United States trades freely and enthusiastically with communist China. You are probably reading this on a device assembled there. The U.S. also trades openly with Vietnam — a communist country where America fought a war that killed 58,000 Americans and ended in defeat. No embargo there.
China and Vietnam faced U.S. sanctions too — but only for roughly a decade each. Cuba has been under embargo for over six decades.
So the principle being applied here is not consistent. If the stated reason — the system of government — were the real reason, the policy would look the same everywhere. It doesn’t.
The actual triggers were geography, corporate assets, and domestic politics.
Cuba is 90 miles from Florida. Before 1959, American corporations ran most of Cuba’s sugar fields, refineries, railroads, hotels, and casinos. When Cuba nationalized those assets, the embargo followed almost immediately. Declassified U.S. government documents show the original stated intent was to “bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of the Cuban government.”
That is not a foreign policy built on principle. That is economic warfare — written down, filed, and executed — against a civilian population, for over 60 years.
Here Is the Argument That Never Gets Made on Television
If you embargo a country for 60 years, block its access to international capital, threaten any nation that tries to trade with it, capture its main oil supplier’s head of state, impose a full energy blockade, and then point at its darkened hospitals and say “see, their system doesn’t work” —
You are not proving their system fails. You are proving that strangulation works.
You do not get to design the conditions for 60 years and then claim you understand the results.
Cuba needed six decades of embargo, CIA operations, a military invasion at the Bay of Pigs, multiple assassination attempts on its leader, the capture of Venezuela’s president, a full oil blockade, and the looming threat of a U.S. aircraft carrier off its coast — to be brought to this point.
That is not a government collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. That is a country that has never been left alone long enough for anyone to honestly know what would have happened.
This Administration Owns This Contradiction
Trump has said he will “take Cuba almost immediately” after finishing the war with Iran — whether he “frees it or takes it.” That is not the language of liberation. That is the language of acquisition.
And Rubio stands at the podium and explains to you, calmly, that none of this is a blockade. That the market did this. That they did this to themselves.
He is smart enough to know better.
Which is exactly what makes it worse.
You don’t have to have an opinion on Cuba’s government to see what is happening here. You just have to be willing to ask the question that the official story was designed to prevent you from asking:
If the goal was always to let a broken system collapse on its own — why has so much force been required to make that happen?
The people in Havana who woke up this morning with no electricity, no running water, and no answer for when either comes back — did not design any of this. Neither did you.
What do you think this actually means for regular people? Drop your thoughts below. Let’s talk like adults — no team jerseys required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_medical_internationalism#Venezuela