President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14380 on 29 January 2026, declaring a national emergency over Cuba and authorising secondary tariffs on any country supplying oil to the island. The order routes its statutory authority through the Cuban Assets Control Regulations (the long-standing sanctions framework) and the 1996 LIBERTAD Act (Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act).
Two mechanisms sit inside the order. Primary sanctions prohibit US persons from transacting with Cuba. Secondary tariffs reach further: they apply to third countries that do so. A Russian tanker owner unloading crude at Havana becomes liable to US tariffs on any unrelated trade with the United States, and so do the shipping insurers and payment intermediaries in the transaction chain. That is the "extraterritorial" scope Havana and UN human rights experts have both named in their subsequent statements.
The practical consequence showed up in weeks. Mexican oil shipments that had backstopped the Cuban thermal fleet were withdrawn by end January once tariff exposure was flagged; PDVSA's 18 March global authorisation arrived carrying the explicit Cuba carve-out that kept state-level Venezuelan crude off-limits. The 29 January signature is upstream of the entire supply-chain collapse the UNE grid bulletin now prices in kilowatt-hours. The order is a domestic US instrument with international reach by design, and the reach is what makes the Cuban case structurally different from a conventional embargo.
