Washington’s Fuel Siege Cuts Cuba’s Intercity Buses From 419 a Day to 11
Washington’s fuel blockade has pushed Cuba’s public transport system to the edge. Daily bus departures from Havana to the provinces have collapsed from 419 in 2025 to just 11 this year, Transport Minister Eduardo Rodríguez Dávila said on October 22. The number of routes has fallen from more than 100 to 21.
The figures turn a familiar euphemism—“economic pressure”—into something brutally concrete. A worker waits hours to reach a job. A family postpones a hospital visit. Food moves more slowly from farm to market. Students, caregivers and cleaners lose pieces of their day at crowded stops because Washington has decided that mobility itself should become leverage against Cuba’s political system.
“Traditional public transportation is at one of its lowest points of all time,” Rodríguez Dávila told reporters.
Reuters reported that passenger journeys are projected to fall 75 percent from 2025 levels. Inter-urban transport has dropped 90 percent, while freight is expected to sink from 70 million tonnes last year to about 20 million this year. Those are not abstract planning numbers. They measure missed appointments, thinner shelves and a nationwide transfer of the blockade’s cost onto ordinary people.
Mobility as a Pressure Point
The immediate crisis follows the January 29 U.S. executive order that sharply tightened pressure on companies and countries supplying oil to Cuba. The Trump administration openly presents the campaign as a tool to force political change. Havana rejects it as collective punishment, and United Nations bodies have repeatedly condemned the long-running embargo as illegal and harmful to human rights.
The effects now reach far beyond the capital. Interprovincial trains that once ran every four days were first reduced to every eight days, then to roughly once every two weeks, according to IPS. In Havana, some urban routes have returned to the streets, but many buses manage only about three trips a day.
Cleaner Estela García told IPS that buses arrive without a reliable schedule but added, “at least they are moving.” That faint relief captures the new baseline: scarcity so severe that unpredictability counts as progress.
An April assessment by the humanitarian analysts at ACAPS estimated that nine million people could be affected by the oil blockade. It warned that shortages were disrupting electricity, transport, food systems, health services and livelihoods at the same time. Cuba produces some of its own oil, but domestic output covers only about 40 percent of estimated daily requirements and cannot replace the missing imports.
The blockade weaponizes that structural dependence. It does not distinguish between a government office and a dialysis patient who needs a ride. Its architects may speak about democracy, but the mechanism is deprivation: restrict fuel, paralyze circulation and hope social pain becomes political surrender.
An Electric Countermove
Cuba is trying to reduce that vulnerability through electrification. The country now has about 150,000 electric vehicles—roughly double the 2025 total and around 15 percent of the registered fleet. By August, electric models accounted for 40 percent of vehicle imports, up from just 3.5 percent in January 2025.
Chinese-built electric tricycles have become a visible part of local transport, and the government has purchased 60 solar charging stations. The shift offers a path away from imported petroleum, but it cannot instantly replace a national bus and freight system. Batteries, spare parts, charging infrastructure and a strained electrical grid all impose limits. Some electric vehicles already sit idle because their batteries cannot be charged reliably.
Still, the transition matters. Every electric bus, tricycle or delivery vehicle is a small act of insulation from a policy designed to turn fuel access into a weapon. Cuba’s transport crisis therefore contains two competing futures: one imposed by Washington through coercive scarcity, and another built through public planning, renewable power and cooperation with countries willing to trade without political conditions.
The numbers announced on October 22 expose who pays while those futures collide. Eleven daily buses cannot connect a capital to an entire country. A 75 percent collapse in passenger journeys cannot be dismissed as an inconvenience. It is a humanitarian emergency with a political author—and a warning that sanctions sold as “targeted” inevitably land on the people least able to absorb them.
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