The Hemispheric Daily Letter

February 10, 2026 - On Trump's Trampling of Cuba, Venezuela, oil and Mexican sovereignty.

Mexican Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum at today’s celebration in Zumpango, for the 111th anniversary of the Mexican Air Force

Today in Zumpango, Mexico, Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum marked the 111th anniversary of the Mexican Air Force. Speaking before the armed forces and representatives of Mexico’s government, Sheinbaum emphasized sovereignty as something Mexico must guard “jealously,” not only against threats from outside, but against those who invite foreign interference. Sovereignty has been a favorite topic of her speeches of late, and with good reason.

Sheinbaum is governing at a moment when Mexico’s hard-won autonomy under Sheinbaum’s leftist populist Morena Party is being tested by the United States under Donald Trump. The Trump administration has taken an openly coercive imperialist posture towards all of the Americas that it proudly says marks a return to The Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine is the long-standing U.S. claim that the Western Hemisphere falls under American authority, giving Washington the right to intervene in Latin American affairs to block outside influence and enforce its own dominance.

Trump’s disregard for Mexican sovereignty has included trying to control Mexico’s domestic decision-making, repeated talk of unilateral U.S. military action inside Mexican territory (which Sheinbaum has soundly rejected), and endless threats of tariff and trade measures designed to force compliance with U.S. priorities.

The unfortunate result of this struggle has most recently seen Sheinbaum at least temporarily capitulating to Trump’s newest demand: Stop shipping oil to Cuba or face new tariffs. Sheinbaum, who has successfully navigated several of Trump’s other threats with diplomatic sophistication, is trying to lessen the damage to Cuba by entering talks with U.S. officials about resuming some shipments under the guise of humanitarian aid.

Cubans are facing an existential humanitarian crisis due to sadistic escalation of the already punitive embargo against Cuba under Donald Trump.

Earlier this year, Venezuela’s oil shipments to Cuba stopped entirely after the U.S. removed Nicolás Maduro from power and placed him in U.S. custody on domestic US drug trafficking charges many observers say were purely invented out of thin air.

As Cuba’s second-largest oil supplier after Venezuela, Mexico had been providing fuel that keeps hospitals running, farms functioning, transportation moving, and the electrical grid from collapsing. Faced with the threat of U.S. retaliation, Sheinbaum’s government suspended Cuban oil shipments at the start of this month.

Reality in Cuba now is bleak. Blackouts have become routine. Flights are canceled for lack of fuel. Medications are scarce. People on the island are dying and suffering. (Full disclosure: Members of my own Cuban family have died and are starving this week because of Trump’s coercive control over Venezuela and Mexico.)

But why Cuba? Why is Trump so dead-set on destroying this small, impoverished island nation of just 10 million people just 85 miles from Florida? Cuba has no natural resources the United States needs. There’s no real strategic need to control Cuba. It’s also not about ideology. The U.S. trades freely with other communist governments, including China.

Cuba matters to Trump (and other American presidents before him) because it stood up to United States colonial power in 1959, and won.

Cuba matters because it had the audacity to become self-determined after centuries of U.S. corporate and political colonization.

In 1959, Cuba removed a U.S.-backed regime, nationalized foreign-owned industries. It created, for a time, a more just and equitable society that did things like turn former U.S. bank buildings into hospitals. And for decades, it prospered in defiance of the United States.

Cuba’s defiant success carried global symbolic weight. A small nation demonstrated that refusal of United States control was possible. That a poor nation could provide universal health care, a universal minimum income, and free education to the highest degrees. Its literacy and life expectancy rates surpassed the United States’.

So the United States made it illegal for its own citizens to travel there, and against the law for any country in the world to trade with both the United States and Cuba.

For more than 60 years, the United States has behaved towards Cuba like an abusive husband who can’t accept his wife left him. United States policy has been to beat the shit out of Cuba, because Cuba didn’t want the U.S. anymore. And still, Cuba survived.

But under Trump—king of the abusive men—that beating is now turning to sadistic murder.

If Trump can’t own the Cubans, it seems, no one can.

And Trump, ever the triangulating sociopath, has forced Mexico’s first socialist president—a woman whose approach to governance has been rooted in many of the same anti-imperial beliefs that guided the Cuban Revolution—to be the one to choose: Help Cuba and hurt your own people, or hurt Cuba and survive another day.

When Sheinbaum spoke of Mexican sovereignty today, she was responding to toxic U.S. patterns that have shaped the region for generations.

And though she’s not one for backing down, the latest manipulation by Trump has tragically left her almost no choice but to participate in the U.S.-driven annihilation of the Cuban people.