A deepening fuel crisis batters Cuba
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More countries advise against all but essential travel to Cuba, as US squeeze on oil supplies bites. It follows moves by the Trump administration to impose what is in effect an oil blockade on the island by threatening tariffs on any country supplying Havana.
Also in the programme: President Trump has repealed a government scientific finding that carbon emissions endanger human health, removing the legal basis for federal climate change regulations; and we ask, is the artificial intelligence revolution going to transform humanity?
(Photo: A man fishes near the Cuban-flagged tanker Alicia, docked at the Matanzas terminal, in Matanzas, Cuba, February 10, 2026. Credit Reuters/Norlys Perez)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.3 | Hello, welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. |
| 0:17.3 | We've got a theme today in very different settings of people talking about revolution, |
| 0:23.0 | or at least of transformation. |
| 0:25.1 | Coming up, Donald Trump's announcement that he's ripping up environmental regulations on a monumental scale. |
| 0:31.4 | In the second half of the programme, the latest on the debate about the AI-fueled jobs revolution, |
| 0:36.3 | already here or just small froth, and we'll be looking |
| 0:39.5 | at a truly change-making election in Bangladesh. We're going to be starting, though, in that traditional |
| 0:45.1 | bastion of revolution in the Caribbean, the island of Cuba, which is facing one of its worst crises |
| 0:51.2 | in its more than 60 years as a communist republic. Four more countries have now |
| 0:56.5 | advised against all but essential travel because of the worsening energy crisis there, with the Cuban |
| 1:01.0 | government warning international airlines they won't be able to refuel because of the US-imposed |
| 1:05.7 | oil blockade. Cuba had previously relied on fuel shipments from Venezuela, so there'll be a big hit to tourism, |
| 1:13.6 | one of the main sources of foreign currency, but there's also a massive hit to the islanders themselves. |
| 1:20.1 | My news, our colleague, Alicia Trujillo, has been speaking to a resident of the capital Havana |
| 1:25.0 | who's asked that we not disclose his name. |
| 1:30.7 | What impact is he feeling from the energy shortages? |
| 1:37.6 | My day-to-day life has been reduced as the life of everybody else to the survival between cycles of blackouts. |
| 1:42.4 | That is now the situation. |
| 1:47.4 | So it is very difficult to do anything else or then perform simple tasks in the house, trying to do something when the electricity |
| 1:54.5 | is already connected. And how long does it last? How long does the blackouts last? |
| 2:00.6 | It depends. 10, 12, 14 hours, 16 hours. And how long does it last? How long does the blackouts last? |
... |
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