TEHRAN – In the obsidian silence of a Havana night, the only light comes from the cold, calculating eyes of Washington’s imperial architects.

As of mid-February, Cuba is no longer merely navigating a sixty-year embargo; it is being subjected to a premeditated experiment in maintenance starvation.

By plunging eleven million people into 20-hour daily blackouts, the United States has transitioned to a policy of high-tech energy siege—the “Donroe Doctrine” in its final, most technologically suffocating form.

Amid the intensifying energy siege, a massive fire erupted on February 13 at Havana’s Ñico López refinery—one of Cuba’s largest facilities and the site of the last Mexican crude delivery.

Though swiftly contained with no injuries or major damage, the blaze has fueled grave suspicions of deliberate arson by CIA elements, timed to exploit acute shortages and accelerate the U.S.-orchestrated collapse.

This is the synthesis of 19th-century Monroe hubris and 21st-century geoeconomic arson, designed to trigger a social explosion by extinguishing the breath of a sovereign nation.

Venezuelan vacuum and high-seas piracy

The architecture of this collapse was locked into place on January 3, with the U.S.-led capture of Nicolás Maduro.

This was not merely a coercive gambit aimed at Venezuela; it was also a surgical strike against Cuba’s jugular.

By physically severing the PDVSA-Cuba “oil-for-doctors” lifeline, which provided up to 50,000 barrels per day, Washington created a “Venezuela Vacuum” that left the island’s energy grid in freefall.

What followed was a descent into state-sponsored piracy. The U.S. Navy now hunts tankers across the Caribbean and Indian Oceans, conducting military boardings to ensure no drop of crude reaches Havana.

Donald Trump’s decree was as blunt as a guillotine: “NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA - ZERO!”

The tariff trap

On January 29, the siege moved from the high seas to the ledger. Executive Order 14380 deployed the tariff trap, a secondary blockade authorizing 100% tariffs on any nation—such as Mexico or Algeria—that dares to supply fuel to the island.

This is the rule of the jungle disguised as trade policy.

While Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum showed defiance by dispatching 814 tons of food and milk on February 12, the brutal reality is that the tariff trap has forced Pemex to suspend crude shipments to avoid a trade war.

Washington is not just blockading Cuba; it is kidnapping the sovereignty of the entire Western Hemisphere.

Rubio’s ghoulish calculus

The ground reality is a Hobbesian nightmare of engineered scarcity.

Since February 8, jet fuel depletion has suspended all international flights, turning once-bustling airports into monuments of isolation.

The humanitarian toll is staggering: 30 major tourist hotels, including Meliá properties, stand dark and shuttered; a mandated four-day workweek has paralyzed the economy; and in the provinces of Santiago de Cuba and Holguín, satellite imagery shows nighttime light intensity has been halved.

But the cruelty is most acute in the hospitals. As backup generators fail, maternity wards and cancer programs have become frontline casualties of Washington’s social sabotage.

Behind this carnage lies the obsessive hand of Marco Rubio, whose role in the administration has been to transform a personal vendetta into a blueprint for continental domination.

Rubio’s logic is as clear as it is ghoulish: by denying the spare parts and stable crude necessary to repair the aging Unión Eléctrica grid, he bets that the darkness will eventually goad the Cuban people into a political surrender.

He views Cuba as a “dying country,” ignoring that it is he who has placed his hands around its throat; yet the posture he embodies is hardly novel.

Washington’s reliance on the primitive tools of coercive deprivation, starvation, and piracy has been remarkably consistent across administrations, even if Rubio has become its most theatrical evangelist.

The ‘zero option’ and the specter of exodus

This engineered famine has also forced a return to the “Zero Option”—a survival strategy mooted by Fidel Castro in the 1990s involving radical rationing and the suspension of public life.

While President Miguel Díaz-Canel urges “creativity” in this darkest hour, he has acknowledged high-level negotiations with Washington.

Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío confirmed an “exchange of messages at the highest level” in early February, signaling that Cuba is willing to renew technical cooperation on cybersecurity and counter-terrorism to alleviate the siege.

The shift in U.S. tactics is telling. After the theatrical capture of Maduro, Washington initially sat back to witness an “inevitable collapse.”

However, the specter of a mass exodus—with one million Cubans, or 10% of the population, having fled in the last five years—now haunts the White House.

The recent State Department offer of $6 million in humanitarian aid may represent a tactical pivot to maintain social order and avoid a direct military intervention.

Against this backdrop, the trajectory becomes impossible to ignore. The U.S. energy siege is designed to ensure that time—and the lights—finally run out.