An Island Nation Watches Another Island Nation in Crisis

As U.S. intelligence agencies paint an increasingly dire picture of Cuba’s economic and political stability, Singapore finds itself observing developments that, while geographically distant, carry implications for this city-state’s strategic interests, economic partnerships, and foreign policy principles.

The situation unfolding in Cuba following the dramatic U.S. military intervention in Venezuela offers Singapore a case study in vulnerabilities that small nations face, the dangers of over-reliance on single partners, and the complex interplay between economic pressure and political change.

Understanding the Cuban Crisis

Cuba’s economy is collapsing under the weight of multiple pressures. The CIA’s recent assessments describe an island nation experiencing blackouts averaging 20 hours per day outside the capital, with agriculture and tourism sectors in severe distress. The potential loss of Venezuelan oil imports, following the U.S. arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and the subsequent redirection of Venezuelan oil shipments to American ports, threatens to push Cuba’s already fragile economy into complete crisis.

President Donald Trump has declared Cuba “ready to fall,” echoing the aspirations of hawkish members of his administration who have long sought regime change in Havana. Yet intelligence assessments remain inconclusive about whether economic suffering will translate into political transformation. The mass emigration of younger Cubans has created a demographic collapse that may actually stabilize rather than destabilize the current government, as those most likely to push for reform have already left the island.

Direct Economic Connections: Limited but Notable

Singapore’s direct economic ties with Cuba are modest but not negligible. Bilateral trade between the two nations has historically been small, with Singapore primarily importing Cuban nickel, tobacco products, and rum, while exporting pharmaceuticals, electronics, and machinery to the island.

However, several Singapore-based companies have maintained interests in Cuba’s nascent private sector and tourism industry. Any political upheaval or economic collapse would directly impact these investments. Singapore shipping companies that occasionally service Caribbean routes could see disruptions, though Cuba represents a minor portion of overall regional traffic.

More significantly, Singapore has positioned itself as a potential facilitator for trade between Asia and Latin America. A destabilized Cuba could complicate Singapore’s efforts to expand commercial relationships across the Caribbean and Central American region, where stability is crucial for long-term economic planning.

Energy Security Lessons: Singapore’s Perpetual Concern

Cuba’s crisis starkly illustrates the dangers of energy dependence that resonate deeply with Singapore’s own strategic planners. Cuba relied heavily on Venezuelan oil for decades, and the sudden severance of this supply has pushed the island to the brink. For Singapore, a nation that imports virtually all its energy needs, this serves as a cautionary tale.

Singapore has deliberately diversified its energy sources, importing natural gas from Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, and Qatar, while building strategic petroleum reserves and investing heavily in renewable energy research. The government has also developed one of the world’s most sophisticated energy trading hubs, ensuring that Singapore has multiple options for sourcing critical supplies.

The Cuban situation reinforces the wisdom of this approach. Singapore’s Energy Market Authority will likely study Cuba’s vulnerability as a case study in what happens when diversification fails and geopolitical shifts cut off critical supplies overnight.

Small Nation Vulnerabilities in a Multipolar World

Perhaps the most profound implication for Singapore is what Cuba’s crisis reveals about the vulnerabilities of small nations in an increasingly multipolar and confrontational global order.

Cuba, like Singapore, is a small island nation with limited natural resources, dependent on international trade and vulnerable to external pressures. While the two nations have followed vastly different political and economic models, with Singapore embracing free-market capitalism and Cuba maintaining state socialism, both face similar existential questions about sovereignty, resilience, and survival in a world dominated by larger powers.

The U.S. military intervention in Venezuela and the subsequent pressure on Cuba demonstrates how quickly the geopolitical landscape can shift for smaller nations caught between competing powers. For Singapore, which has carefully cultivated relationships with both the United States and China while maintaining its independence and neutrality, Cuba’s predicament offers a stark reminder of what can happen when such balancing acts fail.

Singapore’s foreign policy establishment has long emphasized the importance of international law, respect for sovereignty, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. The unilateral military action in Venezuela, regardless of its justification, represents precisely the kind of great power intervention that Singapore has consistently opposed in international forums.

ASEAN Parallels and Regional Stability

Cuba’s crisis also has indirect implications for Singapore’s role within ASEAN. Just as Cuba relied on Venezuela for decades, several ASEAN nations maintain close economic relationships with China, including dependence on Chinese investment, tourism, and trade. The sudden collapse of Venezuela’s support for Cuba illustrates what could happen if geopolitical tensions in Asia escalate and economic relationships are weaponized.

Singapore has been a leading voice within ASEAN for maintaining the organization’s centrality and avoiding over-dependence on any single external power. The Cuban example strengthens the case for ASEAN nations to diversify their economic partnerships and maintain strategic autonomy, even as they deepen ties with major powers.

Furthermore, if Cuba’s government does fall, the subsequent political transition could offer lessons for how regime changes unfold in single-party states. Several ASEAN nations, including Vietnam and Laos, maintain political systems with some similarities to Cuba’s model. Singapore’s strategic analysts will undoubtedly study how economic pressure, demographic shifts, and external intervention interact to either preserve or transform such governments.

Migration and Demographic Implications

One of the most striking aspects of Cuba’s crisis is the demographic collapse caused by mass emigration. U.S. officials estimate that Cuba’s population may have fallen from over 10 million to fewer than 9 million in recent years, with the exodus concentrated among younger people under 50.

Singapore has long grappled with its own demographic challenges, including a low birth rate and an aging population. While Singapore’s solution has been to carefully manage immigration to maintain its workforce and economic dynamism, Cuba’s experience demonstrates the devastating effects when younger populations abandon their homeland en masse.

For Singapore, which hosts a significant foreign workforce and has policies designed to attract global talent, Cuba’s brain drain offers a reminder of what happens when economic opportunities disappear and political freedoms remain constrained. It reinforces Singapore’s commitment to maintaining economic competitiveness and quality of life to retain both citizens and talented foreign residents.

Humanitarian Considerations and Diplomatic Responses

As a responsible member of the international community, Singapore may face decisions about how to respond to a potential humanitarian crisis in Cuba. If the situation deteriorates further, there could be mass migration flows, food shortages, and medical emergencies requiring international assistance.

Singapore has historically contributed to international humanitarian efforts, and a Cuban crisis could prompt requests for aid through multilateral organizations. However, Singapore would need to balance humanitarian concerns with its policy of non-interference in other nations’ internal affairs and its desire to avoid being drawn into the geopolitical confrontation between the United States and Cuba’s government.

Singapore’s diplomatic response will likely emphasize support for international law, peaceful resolution of disputes, and concern for civilian welfare, while avoiding taking sides in the broader U.S.-Cuba confrontation. This approach aligns with Singapore’s long-standing foreign policy principles and its role as a neutral facilitator in international affairs.

Lessons for Economic Resilience

Cuba’s economic model, based on state planning and limited market mechanisms, has been widely criticized for decades. Singapore, despite its own significant state role in the economy through sovereign wealth funds and government-linked companies, operates on fundamentally different principles that emphasize market efficiency, international competitiveness, and economic openness.

The contrast between Cuba’s struggling economy and Singapore’s prosperity reinforces certain policy convictions in Singapore about the importance of free trade, foreign investment, innovation, and institutional quality. However, Singapore’s policymakers also recognize that economic success requires more than just market mechanisms. It demands political stability, rule of law, corruption control, and effective governance, all areas where Singapore has invested heavily.

Cuba’s crisis reminds Singapore that economic resilience requires constant adaptation, diversification, and willingness to reform. While Singapore has been remarkably successful in reinventing its economy over decades, moving from entrepôt trade to manufacturing to services and now to innovation and technology, the government remains vigilant about complacency and the need for continuous transformation.

Strategic Autonomy and the Importance of Alliances

Finally, Cuba’s predicament underscores the importance of Singapore’s approach to international relationships. Rather than relying on a single patron or aligning exclusively with one bloc, Singapore has built a dense network of bilateral and multilateral relationships that provide options and reduce vulnerability.

Singapore maintains close security ties with the United States, including defense cooperation and intelligence sharing, while simultaneously cultivating strong economic relationships with China. The city-state is also deeply embedded in ASEAN, active in multilateral institutions like the United Nations and World Trade Organization, and maintains partnerships with nations across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

This multi-alignment strategy, while complex and sometimes criticized as opportunistic, provides Singapore with resilience that Cuba lacks. When Venezuela’s support disappeared, Cuba had few alternatives. If any of Singapore’s major partners were to suddenly reduce engagement, the city-state would have numerous other relationships to fall back on.

Conclusion: Distant Crisis, Relevant Lessons

Cuba’s unfolding crisis may be geographically distant from Singapore, but it carries relevant lessons for this island nation’s policymakers, business leaders, and citizens. The importance of energy diversification, economic resilience, demographic sustainability, strategic autonomy, and the dangers of over-reliance on single partners all resonate with Singapore’s own experiences and challenges.

As Singapore observes developments in Havana, the primary takeaway is not schadenfreude at a struggling competitor or satisfaction at the vindication of different economic models. Rather, it is a sober reminder that small nations, regardless of their political systems or ideological orientations, face similar existential vulnerabilities in a world where great powers compete and economic lifelines can be severed overnight.

For Singapore, the Cuban crisis reinforces the wisdom of policies that have guided this nation for decades: maintain strategic flexibility, diversify partnerships, invest in resilience, uphold international law, and never take prosperity or stability for granted. In an uncertain world, these principles remain Singapore’s best guarantee of continued success and sovereignty.

The Last Light in Havana

The ceiling fan had stopped spinning three hours ago, when the electricity died at 6 PM sharp, as it did every evening now. Dr. Elena Morales sat in her Havana apartment, watching the last amber threads of daylight dissolve into the Caribbean darkness. In two more hours, maybe three if they were lucky, the power might return for a brief, precious window before dawn.

She struck a match and lit the candle stub on her kitchen table. The flame caught, wavered, then steadied into a small defiant circle of light. Elena had been rationing candles for months now, ever since the Venezuelan oil stopped coming. Twenty candles left. Maybe thirty days if she was careful.

Her phone buzzed—a message from her daughter in Singapore.

Mamá, I transferred more money. Please, use it to buy what you need. There are flights next week. Just say yes.

Elena stared at the screen until it went dark to save battery. Singapore. She’d seen the photos Marisol sent: towers of glass and steel that seemed to pierce the clouds, streets that gleamed even at night, hawker centers overflowing with food from a dozen nations. A place where the lights never went out, where water flowed freely from taps, where her daughter had built a life as a medical researcher that would have been impossible here.

The irony wasn’t lost on Elena. She had once treated Marisol’s departure as a betrayal, another bright mind abandoning the revolution, fleeing to serve capitalism in some distant city-state smaller than Havana. Now, five years later, Marisol’s remittances were all that kept Elena from true hunger.

A knock at the door pulled her from her thoughts.

“Doctora, are you there?”

She recognized Carlos’s voice immediately. Her neighbor, a man of seventy who’d fought in the revolution alongside Fidel himself, now reduced to knocking on doors in the dark.

Elena opened it to find him holding a transistor radio, his weathered face creased with concern.

“Have you heard?” he asked, stepping inside without invitation. “They’re saying it on the foreign stations. The Americans arrested Maduro. Venezuela is sending all their oil to the United States now. All of it, Elena. Every drop.”

She had heard, of course. Everyone had heard. The news had spread through Havana like smoke, whispered in food lines, debated in the shadows of shuttered buildings, discussed in the careful coded language people used when they weren’t quite sure who might be listening.

“Sit, Carlos. I’ll make us coffee.”

“You have coffee?”

“A little. From before.”

She measured out two precious spoons of grounds, added water from the bucket she’d filled that morning during the three-hour window when the pipes had pressure. The gas stove still worked, one of the few remaining mercies. As the coffee percolated, its aroma filled the small kitchen like a memory of better times.

“My grandson wants to leave,” Carlos said quietly. “He’s twenty-two. He says there’s nothing left here for him. He wants to go to Miami on one of those rafts. I told him he’s crazy, that the sea would kill him, but Elena…” He paused, his voice cracking. “Maybe the sea would be kinder than what’s coming.”

Elena poured the coffee into two chipped cups and sat across from him. Through the window, she could see Havana stretching into darkness. Here and there, candlelight flickered in windows like fallen stars. Once, this city had blazed with light, music, and possibility. Now it was becoming a constellation of small, isolated flames, each one burning alone.

“Do you remember,” Carlos asked, “when we thought we could change the world?”

“We were young,” Elena said. “Young people always think they can change the world.”

“And now the young ones only want to leave it.”

They sat in silence, sipping bitter coffee that tasted of rationed supplies and vanished dreams.

Elena thought of Marisol again, her daughter who now lived in a place that seemed to exist in a different century, a different reality. Marisol had tried to explain Singapore to her once during a video call: a tiny island nation with no natural resources that had somehow become one of the richest places on earth. No oil, no gas, no farmland to speak of, yet they had built gardens in the sky, turned their port into the world’s busiest, invested in education and innovation until they’d created something that shouldn’t have been possible.

“How?” Elena had asked. “How did they do it?”

Marisol had paused, choosing her words carefully. “They made different choices, Mamá. Not better, not worse—just different. They decided to be practical instead of ideological. They opened up instead of closing off. They looked at what worked instead of what should work.”

The words had stung, though Marisol hadn’t meant them to.

Now, sitting in the darkness with Carlos and his transistor radio crackling with reports of Venezuela’s collapse, Elena wondered if those different choices had made all the difference.

“The Americans say we’re going to fall,” Carlos said, fiddling with the radio dial. “Trump says Cuba is finished. No more oil, no more income, no more options.” He looked at her with eyes that had seen revolution, triumph, struggle, and now, perhaps, the end of it all. “Do you think he’s right?”

Elena took a long sip of coffee, letting the question hang in the air with the candle smoke. Through the window, she heard footsteps in the street below, quick and furtive. Someone heading home before full darkness fell. Someone trying to reach safety before the night brought out the desperation that came with empty stomachs and darker thoughts.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that we Cubans have survived many things. The Americans thought we would fall in the sixties, in the seventies, in the nineties after the Soviets left. We’re still here.”

“But for how much longer? And at what cost?” Carlos gestured to the darkness around them. “Half my family is gone, Elena. My children in Miami, my grandchildren scattered across Spain, Mexico, Ecuador. My daughter-in-law just made it to Panama. The census says we’re ten million, but you and I both know there aren’t even nine million left on this island. Soon it will be just us old revolutionaries, sitting in the dark, telling each other stories about glory days that the young ones can’t even imagine anymore.”

Elena had no answer for that. The statistics were undeniable. Cuba was hemorrhaging its youth, its future, its hope. The boats kept leaving, the rafts kept launching, the airports kept processing one-way tickets. Those who couldn’t leave stayed in survival mode, too exhausted by the daily struggle for food, water, and electricity to think about political change or revolution.

Her phone buzzed again. Another message from Marisol, this time with a photo: her daughter standing in a place called Gardens by the Bay, surrounded by towering artificial trees glowing with thousands of lights. Behind her, the Singapore skyline sparkled like a jeweled crown against the night.

The caption read: They turn these on every night, Mamá. Every single night, the whole city lights up. Please come visit. Please come home to me.

Home. The word felt strange now. Was home the place where you were born, where you’d spent your whole life, even as that place crumbled around you? Or was home where your daughter lived, where the lights stayed on, where doctors like Elena could practice medicine with reliable equipment and consistent electricity?

“What will you do?” Carlos asked, as if reading her thoughts.

Elena looked at the candle burning between them, its small flame fighting against an ocean of darkness. She thought of the twenty candles left in her cupboard, the thirty days they represented, the impossible calculus of survival.

“I’ll finish my coffee,” she said. “Then I’ll go to sleep. Tomorrow I have patients at the clinic, and they need me.”

“And after tomorrow?”

“After tomorrow, I’ll see what comes.”

It was the only honest answer she had. Cuba had taught her many things, but perhaps the most important lesson was this: when you’re living through history, you rarely know which way it will break. The revolution had come when no one expected it. The Special Period had ended when everyone thought it would last forever. And now, this new crisis—would it topple the government as Trump predicted, or would Cuba endure as it always had, through sheer stubbornness and the inability to imagine any other way?

Carlos finished his coffee and stood to leave. At the door, he paused.

“My grandson asked me something yesterday,” he said. “He asked why we stayed. Why we didn’t leave when we could, when we were young enough to start over somewhere else. I told him it was because we believed in something bigger than ourselves, because we thought we were building a better world.” He smiled sadly. “But I think maybe we stayed because we didn’t have enough imagination to see ourselves anywhere else. Not like the young ones today, with their phones showing them everything we’re missing.”

After he left, Elena sat alone with her candle and her phone and the message from Singapore glowing on the screen.

Outside, Havana breathed in the darkness. Somewhere, a guitar played a slow son, the music drifting through open windows on the humid night air. Somewhere, a mother was tucking her children into bed and promising them breakfast, praying the food lines wouldn’t be too long tomorrow. Somewhere, a young person was looking at boat schedules, plane tickets, raft-building tutorials, planning their escape from an island that felt more like a prison with each passing blackout.

And somewhere, in a gleaming city on the other side of the world, her daughter was probably lying awake, worrying about the mother who refused to leave the only home she’d ever known.

Elena looked at the candle again. It had burned down to half its height, and by morning it would be gone. Twenty candles left. Then nineteen. Then eighteen.

But not tonight. Tonight, there was still light.

She picked up her phone and began typing a response to Marisol. The words came slowly, each one a small surrender, a tiny revolution of its own.

Mija, tell me more about Singapore. Tell me about the lights that never go out. Tell me what it’s like to live somewhere that chose a different path. Maybe it’s time I learned to imagine myself somewhere else.

She hit send before she could change her mind, then blew out the candle to save what remained.

In the darkness, Elena sat and waited for dawn, or for the power to return, or for something else entirely—some third option she couldn’t yet see, some future that existed in the space between holding on and letting go, between loyalty to a dying dream and the practical surrender to what might come next.

Outside her window, Havana dreamed its fevered dreams, caught between past and future, between revolution and evolution, between the last light of what was and the uncertain darkness of what might be.