Is Latin America Abandoning Cuba?

You might think that the Trump administration has its hands full in Iran. But it seems to be as focused on Cuba as ever. At a news conference on Monday, President Trump said: “I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba.”

My colleague Frances Robles broke the news that the administration was in talks with Cuban officials to oust President Miguel Díaz-Canel from power — but leave the country’s repressive regime in place. It sounds like Trump is contemplating a Cuba version of what he has done in Venezuela and Iran — remove the leader — only this time without the use of military force.

What’s striking is how little other Latin American countries, even those on the left, have come to Cuba’s defense. Today’s newsletter explains why.

Cuba, abandoned?

By Simon Romero

For decades, Cuba has been held up as an ideological lodestar by leftists across Latin America.

Fidel Castro and his longhaired guerrillas inspired people across the region by slashing illiteracy, expanding public health care and raising life expectancy. Even from Castro’s 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 sees it not as a place of revolutionary nostalgia, but of authoritarian dysfunction. And the leftists at the helm of the region’s three most populous countries — Brazil, Mexico and Colombia — have been letting Cuba founder instead of providing it with emergency fuel shipments and risking Trump’s wrath.

Their stance is a seismic shift. And taken together, Latin America’s reorientation toward Cuba reflects an even more sweeping change in the region’s politics.

The former cradle of the revolution

Over the past three months, Cuba has been plunged into isolation.

Venezuela, once Cuba’s top oil supplier, stopped sending fuel after the U.S. captured President Nicolás Maduro and took control.

In February, Nicaragua halted visa-free travel for Cubans. This month, Ecuador expelled all Cuban diplomats. Multiple countries, including Guatemala, Honduras and Jamaica, have moved to end deals that paid Cuba for exporting its doctors — a crucial source of hard currency for its government.

It all makes for a stark difference from a decade and a half ago, when Cuba was the center of a regional embrace driven by nostalgia and efforts to consolidate autonomy from Washington during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Perhaps the two countries that best exemplify this shift are Mexico and Brazil.

Mexico was the Cuban Revolution’s cradle, the base from which an exiled Fidel Castro launched his armed struggle. After the revolution in 1959, Mexico was the only country in Latin America that refused to yield to U.S. pressure to break diplomatic and trade ties.

Mexico has long served as Cuba’s defender in international forums. Under the leftist administrations of President Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, it became a critical economic lifeline, supplying Cuba with subsidized oil.

But Mexico is exceptionally dependent on trade with the U.S. And in late January, after the Trump administration threatened to impose crippling tariffs on countries that provide Cuba with fuel, Sheinbaum halted all oil exports to the island. Today, Mexico is sending food and medicine instead.

A Cuba-skeptical public

In Brazil, Latin America’s most populous country, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration has a tradition of supporting Cuba. Brazil is also Latin America’s largest producer of oil. But like Mexico, it, too, is limiting its help to humanitarian aid, largely made up of basic food staples.

Like all countries in the region, Brazil faces potential retaliation from Washington. But domestic skepticism about helping Cuba has also been growing.

Previous efforts to boost Cuba’s economy have left Brazil with unpaid debt. When the right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2023, he used his opponents’ support for Cuba as a rallying cry for his own supporters.

Cuba’s crackdowns on dissent — like the expansion of censorship measures and civilian groups that spy and inform on neighbors — have also hurt the country’s standing, including among the Brazilian left.

Cuba’s economic decline is also having an effect on Brazil and other countries in the region. Since 2020, an estimated 2.75 million people have fled Cuba in the largest demographic decline in the country’s modern history. And stricter U.S. immigration policies have meant that countries like Brazil and Mexico have become primary destinations.

In 2025, Cubans became the top asylum-seeking nationality in Brazil, surpassing Venezuelans for the first time. The arrival of so many new Cuban migrants in Brazil and other countries around the region, one historian told me, is seen as a vivid illustration of the failings of the Cuban regime.

An ascendant right

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.

Now El Salvador’s president is Nayib Bukele. He’s a Trump ally and a star of the Latin American right, a group largely seen as ascendant in the region.

This month, Bukele joined his right-leaning counterparts from countries including Argentina, Honduras, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Paraguay at a summit in Florida organized by the Trump administration.

Bukele and others applauded enthusiastically when 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.”

Read Simon’s full piece here.

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