'If the Cuban government were to collapse, that would be a security threat to the United States'

François Picard is pleased to welcome, live from Havana, Emily Morris, Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London's Institute of the Americas. The US fuel embargo on Cuba has shifted from an abstract policy dispute into something felt in the grain of everyday life. This is not simply a "shortage", but a sequence of events: curtailed events, warnings of deeper power cuts and above all, a transport squeeze that limits mobility, work and institutional routines like universities moving remotely. The most corrosive feature is uncertainty; the sense that people can adapt to hardship, but not to not knowing what comes next. The most likely scenario is a standoff: frustration in the US, hardship in Cuba, and rising international and domestic disquiet. And if the goal is to trigger a rupture between citizens and the state, the mechanism may run the other way, because when hardship is visibly linked to external pressure, reliance on the government for basic provisioning often increases.