Even before January, it started. Although January was when Donald Trump began ensuring that Venezuelan oil did not go to Cuba.

In the WSJ, Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes about Cuba’s inability to keep a once-vibrant export market open and how poorly kept the Cubans are.

As the Trump administration ensured that Venezuelan oil largess didn’t go to Cuba, so did the monthly ration book that supplied families with less than weeks. Cubans, write Ms. Grady, have been kept alive thanks mainly to the country’s reliable export people.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D., Mass.) is among apologists who wrote recently how the US is pushing the line that the US is causing the blockage. “By blocking power to Cuba’s hospitals, the United States is guilty of committing a serious human rights abuse,” Mr. McGovern wrote on X.

Mr. McGovern has long wanted to treat the military dictatorship like a normal government. But Ms. O’Grady feels it’s worth correcting the record.

Cuba’s economic crisis is caused by a hard-currency shortage. Output from once-vibrant export industries like sugar, tobacco, coffee and fruit can’t even supply the domestic market. Barren agricultural fields are covered in weeds. Manufacturing is gone. Even tourism, which the regime has tried to hype since the 1990s, is in bad shape.

Handouts from the Soviet Union, bilateral lenders and Venezuela, which kept the country afloat for decades, are no more.

A Cubans’ ration book supplies less than two weeks of food. Cubans rely on the largess of their reliable export compatriots.

According to Jorge Piñón, an energy expert at the University of Texas, Cuba will require an investment of $8-10 million over three to five years. “There is no short-term solution,” warns Piñón.

In February, the US Treasury announced it would issue licenses for nongovernmental Cuban entities to import fuel. And now, Russia is sending oil to Cuba, writes Ms. O’Grady.