But I think there's something potentially different about this moment. What's happening now is just this

slow descent into something that feels very, very dark. Does what the United States doing right now

rise to a level of an act of war? A month and a half after removing Nicholas Maduro from power in

Venezuela, the Trump administration is turning up pressure

on another Latin American country, Cuba. What is the Trump administration seeking to accomplish

with its effort to deepen Cuba's isolation? How is Cuba's communist government responding to

Washington's intensifying economic pressure? In what might follow if the regime in Ivana falls?

From the Council on Foreign Relations, welcome to the president's inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay. Today I'm

being joined by Michael Bustamante, chair in Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of

Miami. Michael, thank you very much for joining me. Thanks for the invitation,

Jim. I'd like to jump right into it, Michael. Since the Trump administration captured Nicholas

Maduro early last month, it has turned up the economic pressure on Cuba. Could you walk me through

what it is that the administration has been doing?

Sure. Essentially, it's mostly about oil. When Nicolas Maduro fell, Cuba lost its largest and

most stable supplier of oil. And that's important for Cuba, because Cuba, while it produces about 40% of the oil

that it consumes, it imports the rest. And all of that imported oil fuels the power grid,

a power grid that had already been ailing. Just to give you an idea, Cuba had something like

five nationwide power outages last year, so prior to Maduro's removal.

So they've cut off Venezuelan supplies.

The U.S. owns where Venezuelan oil goes at the moment.

And they've also threatened tariffs on any country continuing to trade oil and supply oil to Cuba.

And that was an action really targeted at Mexico in particular,

...