For decades, Cuba has been held up as an ideological lodestar by leftists across Latin America. Fidel Castro and his longhaired guerrillas fueled inspiration by slashing illiteracy, expanding public health care and raising life expectancy.
Even among opponents, Cuba often earned grudging respect as an unyielding bastion of resistance against generations of American presidents.
But now Cuba is running out of oil, and its economy is nearing collapse. A new wave of right-wing leaders in Latin America see Cuba not as a place of revolutionary nostalgia, but of authoritarian dysfunction. And in a seismic shift, the leftists at the helm of the region’s three most populous countries — Brazil, Mexico and Colombia — will not provide Cuba with emergency fuel shipments out of fear of incurring President Trump’s wrath.
“Any gesture of independence now carries the threat of immediate, devastating retaliation,” from the United States said Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a political scientist at Mexico’s Monterrey Institute of Technology. “One simply cannot predict the fallout of President Trump’s ire.”
Taken together, Latin America’s reorientation of its ties to Cuba reflects a sweeping change in the region’s politics, marking a rupture from what had been a wide diplomatic embrace of the island nation. Latin America’s leaders are now finding the costs of siding with Cuba too high after 67 years of Cuba’s one-party Communist state persisting in the face of U.S. resistance.
Mexico showcases this dilemma. It was the Cuban Revolution’s cradle, from which an exiled Fidel Castro launched his armed struggle. It was also Cuba’s longtime protector, supplying Cuba with oil while reliably defending it on the world stage.
At the start of the year, Mexico had emerged as Cuba’s top oil supplier. At the same time, Mexico is exceptionally dependent on trade with the United States. In late January, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, halted all oil exports to Cuba after the Trump administration threatened crippling tariffs on countries that provide Cuba with fuel.
Brazil and Colombia, two oil-exporting countries governed by leftists who had previously tried to ease Cuba’s isolation by pressing for the U.S. government to remove Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, are also doing little to help ease Cuba’s energy shortage.
Venezuela, which came to Cuba’s rescue after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was, until recently, Cuba’s top oil supplier, stopped sending fuel to the Cuban government after U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s leader, killed 32 Cuban advisers in the attack and took control of Venezuela’s oil industry.
Deepening Cuba’s regional isolation, Ecuador expelled all Cuban diplomats, claiming interference by Cuban agents in its domestic affairs. Nicaragua halted visa-free travel for Cubans, cutting off an important route for migrants to reach the United States. Guatemala, Honduras and Jamaica moved to end deals that paid Cuba for providing doctors. Cuba’s medical missions around the world are a crucial source of hard currency for its government.
In Mexico, a proud tradition of assisting Cuba appears to be operating on borrowed time.
Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Mexico was the only country in Latin America to refuse to yield to U.S. pressure exerted on all member countries of the Organization of American States to break diplomatic and trade ties with Cuba.
That stance produced an informal arrangement in which Mexico would consistently defend Cuba in international forums and oppose the U.S. trade embargo, while Fidel Castro agreed not to export revolution to Mexican soil.
Under the leftist administrations of Ms. Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s protection shifted from diplomatic rhetoric to becoming a critical economic lifeline for Cuba.
When Venezuela’s oil shipments to Cuba plummeted in recent years because of economic disarray in Venezuela, Mexico emerged as one of Cuba’s top suppliers of subsidized oil, even as Mexico’s oil industry was hampered by declining production and soaring debts.
After the U.S. increased pressure on Venezuela in the run-up to capturing its leader, Nicolás Maduro, Mexico eclipsed Venezuela in 2025 to become the top oil supplier to Cuba. But not for long.
In late January, when the Trump administration threatened Mexico with tariffs if it continued to ship oil, Ms. Sheinbaum’s government shifted to sending food and medicine instead.
Across Latin America, the Trump administration’s blockade of oil shipments to Cuba is testing ties at a crucial juncture. Fuel for vehicles is growing scarce, and blackouts are plaguing the electric grid, raising questions about whether the regime can survive. Cuba on Friday acknowledged for the first time that it was in discussions with the United States to defuse their confrontation.
In Brazil, Latin America’s most populous country, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration has had to balance a tradition of supporting Cuba with Washington’s threats of retaliation and growing domestic skepticism of helping Cuba.
“This path of escalating pressure, to systematically asphyxiate the island, ends up victimizing the entire population,” said Celso Amorim, Mr. Lula’s chief foreign policy adviser, in a telephone interview.
The U.S. pressure campaign aimed at coercing Cuba’s leaders into making concessions, Mr. Amorim said, would most likely have the “opposite effect” of hardening a regime for whom standing up to the United States is a core ideological tenet.
Still, Brazil, with its diversified economy and its status as Latin America’s largest producer of oil and agricultural commodities, could arguably adopt a more assertive posture in alleviating the crisis in Cuba.
But like Mexico, Brazil is limiting its help to humanitarian aid, largely of basic food staples. Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras, produces nearly twice as much oil as Pemex, its Mexican counterpart, but has opted against supplying fuel to Cuba.
Mr. Amorim said he could not speak for Petrobras. But he cited the company’s extensive web of international banking ties, including in the United States, which could expose it to “secondary sanctions or retaliatory measures.”
A spokesman at Petrobras, which is publicly traded but controlled by Brazil’s government, did not immediately respond to a query about the company’s approach to Cuba.
Other factors weigh on Brazil’s deliberations over aiding Cuba. With Mr. Lula’s leftist Workers Party holding power in Brazil for the better part of the past quarter-century, the authorities have faced criticism over previous efforts to bolster Cuba’s economy.
During Mr. Lula’s first term, Brazil began financing construction of the Port of Mariel, a deepwater port capable of handling enormous cargo ships. Brazil’s national development bank provided more than $600 million for the project.
But the project stalled, saddling Brazil with unpaid debt from Cuba. When Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil’s right-wing president from 2019 to 2023, he used his opponents’ support of Cuba as a rallying cry for his own supporters. Now Mr. Lula is facing a re-election bid against Mr. Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio Bolsonaro, in what is becoming a highly competitive race.
Cuba’s increasingly draconian crackdowns on dissent, including the expansion of civilian groups that spy and inform on neighbors and new censorship measures criminalizing online criticism of Cuba’s political system, have also hurt Cuba’s standing. As happened in Venezuela under Mr. Maduro, who also imprisoned hundreds of political critics, these moves have withered the support Cuba traditionally held in the Brazilian left.
“Cuba’s treatment of the domestic opposition has made it very difficult even for hard-core cadres of the Workers Party to come out in support of the regime,” said Matias Spektor, a political scientist at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil.
Then there is the effect that Cuba’s economic decline is having on Brazil and other countries in Latin America. Since 2020, an estimated 2.75 million people have fled Cuba, the largest demographic decline in the country’s modern history.
The Cuban diaspora is undergoing a major shift. While the United States remains the main target for many Cuban migrants, stricter U.S. policies have turned countries like Brazil and Mexico into primary destinations.
Brazil has seen the biggest surge in Cuban migration. In 2025 Cubans became the top asylum-seeking nationality there, surpassing Venezuelans for the first time.
The arrival of so many new Cuban migrants, in Brazil and other countries around the region, is seen as a vivid illustration of the failings of the Cuban regime and its planned-economy governing model, said Lillian Guerra, a historian at the University of Florida.
“None of those folks are cheering their government,” Ms. Guerra said. “They have all been vectors about what is actually happening in Cuba.”
This exodus occurs in a context sharply different from a decade and a half ago, when Cuba was the center of a regional embrace driven by revolutionary nostalgia and efforts to consolidate autonomy from Washington during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2009, after Mauricio Funes, a leftist, took office as El Salvador’s president, he made his country the last in the region to recognize Cuba. The island nation seemed to have come full circle from its isolation in the 1960s, when Mexico was the only Latin American country that dared have diplomatic ties with Havana.
Now El Salvador’s president is Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who has used mass incarceration and the suspension of civil liberties to lower his nation’s crime rate, emerging as a star of the Latin American right. This month, Mr. Bukele joined counterparts from countries including Argentina, Honduras, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Paraguay, at a summit organized in Florida by the Trump administration.
Forming a broad coalition at odds with Havana, Mr. Bukele and others enthusiastically applauded when Mr. Trump told the gathering that Cuba’s Communist government had been brought to its knees, and that “Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was.”
Simon Romero is a Times correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He is based in Mexico City.
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