The Private Sector Was Supposed to Be the Point

The contract was real. The company was registered in Florida. The barrels — roughly 250,000 of them, gasoline and diesel — had a destination, a route, and a counterparty that had already negotiated storage at facilities on the island. The deal was not a sanctions workaround dressed as humanitarianism; it was specifically structured to supply Cuba's private sector and its religious and humanitarian organizations, the exact constituency that American policy had spent a decade insisting it was trying to help. On June 15, the Trump administration blocked the shipment. The fuel did not move. And the clause that was supposed to make this permissible — the idea that Washington's quarrel was always with the regime and never with the Cuban people — turned out to be a piece of language rather than a policy.

The company in question, Vanguard Energy, had signed a contract to lease Cuban government storage facilities for the fuel. That detail is the one the news coverage notes briefly and moves past. It is the detail that contains everything. The Trump administration's objection, according to reporting by Democracy Now confirmed by Havana Times on June 15, was that Vanguard had not received proper prior authorization. Which is almost certainly true, and almost certainly irrelevant to the people in Havana who will spend the next week standing in line for a ration of cooking gas that will not arrive.

There is an old argument about Cuba policy, and it goes like this: pressure the state, protect the people. The embargo was never supposed to be about ordinary Cubans; it was supposed to be about the revolution's leadership class, the military enterprise structure, the generals who run the hotels and the colonels who skim the remittance flows. The private-sector argument — articulated most explicitly during the Obama years — was that a growing class of self-employed Cubans, small restaurateurs, taxi drivers, Airbnb hosts, and mobile vendors, would over time become an economic constituency with interests distinct from the state's. You could accelerate this by ensuring they had access to fuel, foreign currency, and Internet connectivity. You could, in other words, use the private sector as a wedge.

This argument was always partially wishful and partially correct. It was wishful because the Cuban state never intended to permit a genuinely independent economic class to emerge; every liberalization since 2010 has come bundled with mechanisms for clawing back the gains. It was partially correct because the private sector, despite everything, did grow — the number of licensed self-employed workers rose significantly after 2015, paladares multiplied, and a small but real class of Cubans developed interests that did not entirely align with the command economy. The window that opened in 2015 was brief and it closed again, as this publication has argued before, but it left something behind: roughly half a million people who were trying to build something outside the state.

It is those people that Vanguard Energy's 250,000 barrels were going to reach. The fuel was not destined for CUPET, Cuba's state oil monopoly. It was not going to top off the tank of a military vehicle or heat the offices of a ministry. It was going to go to the private sector and to the churches and NGOs — the organizational layer below the state that the United States has spent enormous diplomatic capital claiming to support. When Washington killed the shipment, it did not wound the regime. The regime has a separate fuel allocation and a separate set of suppliers, diminished though they are. What it wounded was the constituency that American policy had identified, since at least 2009, as the lever by which Cuba would eventually change.

Now give the other side its due, because it earns it. The objection from the administration's perspective is not frivolous. Vanguard Energy signed a lease with a Cuban government entity to store the fuel. Money for storage facilities flows to the state. Any commercial arrangement that requires leasing Cuban government infrastructure is, at some level, a transfer of value to the same system that the sanctions architecture is designed to starve. The administration's position — that companies wanting to do business involving Cuba need to go through proper licensing channels, that ad hoc deals create exactly the kind of opaque financial flows that allow the regime to extract rent from transactions nominally aimed at civil society — is not an unreasonable position on its own terms. Sanctions are not a precision instrument. They never have been. If the standard is that no fuel can flow through any facility connected to the Cuban state, then no fuel flows to Cuba at all, because the Cuban state is connected to everything.

This is the trap that has been present in Cuba policy since the embargo began, and that the Obama opening briefly pretended to dissolve, and that is now fully visible again. The only way to help Cuban civil society is to operate within the Cuban state's infrastructure, because the state owns the infrastructure. The only way to maintain the credibility of the sanctions regime is to prevent commercial actors from operating within that infrastructure. These two positions are not reconcilable. Every administration has chosen one or the other and then justified the choice as the one that will eventually change Cuba. None of them have. Cuba in June 2026 — with 55 percent fewer tourists in the first four months of the year than in the same period of 2025, with domestic fuel so scarce that the energy minister acknowledged in May that the country had run out of oil and diesel, with an electrical grid that has been in effective collapse since March — is the accumulated product of both strategies failing in sequence.

The Díaz-Canel government announced a package of economic reforms this week. Foreign Cubans would be permitted to invest. State-owned companies would get greater access to foreign currency markets. Havana was presenting these measures, with the straight face that command economies achieve only through practice, as a response to the crisis rather than as an acknowledgment of sixty years of structural failure. The exile community in South Florida received the announcement with the skepticism it has earned over sixty years of similar announcements. The reforms will move through the approval mechanisms of a one-party state and will arrive, as they always do, somewhat smaller than advertised and hedged with provisions that ensure the military enterprise structure retains control of anything that generates hard currency.

The 2015 opening asked Cuba's private-sector class to become the mechanism of change. Ten years later, that class is still standing in the dark, waiting for fuel that the Florida company contracted to deliver and that Washington decided, on a technicality of prior authorization, to block. The private sector was supposed to be the point of the whole exercise. It turns out it was the lever that neither Washington nor Havana actually wanted pulled.

The barrels are sitting somewhere. The contract is real. The people who needed the fuel are going without it, as they have been going without so many things, and the argument about who bears the responsibility circles the island like a ship that cannot find a port willing to take on its cargo.

Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal.