The Monroe Doctrine Is Building Chinese Solar Farms in Cuba
Written by Matt Morgan, Editor at The Daily Bell:
The Trump administration has spent the past year reasserting the Monroe Doctrine.
The November 2025 National Security Strategy names a “Trump Corollary” to it. Trump himself has called it the “Donroe Doctrine.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio summarized the principle in plain English:
“This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live. We’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.”
All of this comes while Cuba installs one gigawatt of Chinese-financed solar power in a single year, with 92 Chinese-built solar parks scheduled to come online by 2028. Russian oil tankers dock in Havana harbor. Iranian shadow-fleet logistics move crude through the Caribbean. The doctrine designed two centuries ago to keep European powers from extending their system into the hemisphere has hand-delivered Cuba’s energy market to Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. The harder Washington enforces the doctrine, the faster the inversion accelerates.
What Monroe Actually Said
The 1823 message to Congress was narrow and conditional. President Monroe warned that any European attempt to extend “their system to any portion of this hemisphere” would be considered “dangerous to our peace and safety.” The phrase “their system” referred to the autocratic and mercantilist political order of the Holy Alliance, the European arrangement that Adam Smith had taken apart in print fifty years earlier. Monroe also said that the United States would not interfere with “the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power.” The doctrine, as originally articulated, was defensive and hands-off. It described a hemisphere of independent states protected from one specific kind of foreign interference.
The doctrine was, in practice, enforced by the Royal Navy. The United States in 1823 did not have a fleet capable of preventing a Spanish reconquest of Latin America. The British did, and British commercial interests aligned with American ones against any return of Spanish mercantilism. The doctrine worked, to the extent that it worked at all, because a great power outside the hemisphere had economic reasons to underwrite it. The hemisphere has never been a self-enforcing American holding. It has always been a contested space in which the question is which outside power’s commercial interests align with the local arrangement.
The Inversion in Real Time
Cuba conducts, in 2026, one of the fastest solar build-outs on the planet. The Caribbean island has installed roughly one gigawatt of solar capacity in the past twelve months, enough to power about 1.5 million homes. The infrastructure is overwhelmingly Chinese. Chinese solar panel exports to Cuba jumped from $3 million in 2023 to $117 million in 2025. A Chinese-Cuban agreement provides for 92 solar parks across the island by 2028, totaling two gigawatts of generation. Renewable power has gone from three percent of Cuban electricity in 2024 to roughly ten percent now, headed for a stated 24 percent by 2030. The CNN reporting, which draws on the energy think tank Ember, makes the relationship explicit: the harder the US oil embargo strangles Cuban fuel supplies, the faster the Chinese solar arrangement scales.
Oil itself tells the same story. A Russian tanker carrying 100,000 tonnes of crude docked in Havana at the end of March. President Putin has stated that Russian shipments will continue regardless of US threats. Iranian shadow-fleet logistics, having spent years moving Iranian and Venezuelan oil to China, are increasingly the only commercial channels available to Cuba. Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran are now the suppliers of last resort for an island ninety miles off Key West.
The doctrine designed to keep one foreign power’s system out of one hemisphere has produced this: the three powers that the National Security Strategy identifies as the principal adversaries of the United States have become, between them, the energy underwriters of a country that sits at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico. The doctrine has not failed at the margin. It has produced its own opposite.
Why This Happens
Markets are how hundreds of millions of people, holding information no central authority can possess, coordinate billions of decisions. When a planner forecloses one direction of trade, the trade does not stop. It reorganizes around whatever channels remain open.
Washington has decided, sixty-three years into the embargo and harder than ever in 2026, that Cubans may not buy oil from Mexicans, that Mexican companies may not sell to Cuban buyers under threat of US tariffs, that Venezuelan oil may not reach the island after the US intervention in Venezuela that abducted President Maduro in January. Each foreclosed Western channel has produced a substitute. Soviet sugar purchases in the 1960s. Venezuelan oil under Chavez. Mexican fuel in the 2010s. Now Chinese solar panels and Russian tankers.
The planners do not get to decide whether trade happens. They get to decide which suppliers the rest of the hemisphere is forbidden to use. By foreclosing the Western alternatives one by one, they have handed the region’s energy market, in pieces, to the powers they say they are containing. This is the predictable result. It is what every comprehensive embargo of the past sixty years has produced, in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Russia. The supplier simply shifts. Trade has never stopped.
What the Doctrine Has Produced
Monroe’s principle, in 1823, was that no foreign power should be allowed to extend “their system to any portion of this hemisphere.”
The doctrine’s loudest defenders in 2026 have done it for them.
The Cubans are buying their solar panels from Beijing, their oil from Moscow, and their logistics from Tehran.
The doctrine has not failed. Instead, it's kept Western economic interests from providing the benefits they claim to champion.