HAVANA, June 13 -- In much of Cuba the lights now stay off for twenty hours a day. Hospitals run on failing generators, food rots in dead refrigerators, and the United Nations' senior human rights official says children are dying because their doctors cannot get medicine. Into that darkness, Washington has decided the real problem is that the pressure is not yet hard enough.

On Wednesday the Trump administration sanctioned Union Cuba-Petroleo, the state company known as CUPET that refines and distributes almost all the fuel the island has left, according to Al Jazeera. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the firm a tool of Cuba's repressive security apparatus and accused the country's Communist leaders of diverting energy to line their...