Alex Ritson

There's no fuel with which to run the rubbish trucks.

Amid this energy crisis, such basic services are some of the first to go.

The Trump administration's oil shutout is a far cry from the optimism of Washington's Cuba policy of a decade ago.

Next month marks the 10th anniversary of Barack Obama's historic visit to Cuba, becoming the first sitting US president to step foot on the island in almost a century.

The man who oversaw the diplomatic thaw was the then US ambassador to Cuba, Jeffrey De Laurentiis.

with a lot of potential for unintended consequences.

The former US ambassador thinks the Trump administration is trying to repeat in Cuba the model it's applied in Venezuela.

That is not overnight change, but rather working with an acceptable partner inside the existing regime.

20 years ago,

The diaspora, mostly in South Florida, would have been completely opposed to that kind of approach.

In the meantime, drivers must use a government-run app called Ticket, under which they're allowed a maximum of 20 litres of fuel, paid for in US dollars.

Esteban Bello is a tour operator with several Almendrones, the big gas-guzzling 1950s automobiles.

He drives me around in his own beat-up Hyundai on a fruitless search of the city's petrol stations.

There's a problem here, the fuel problem, so surely the people at the top on both sides have to sit down and figure this out, Esteban says bluntly.

This is affecting the entire country, all of us, from the very top to the very bottom.

In a time of delicate diplomacy allegedly taking place over this beleaguered nation, it was a diplomatic answer.

But the truth is those at the very top are feeling the oil blockade much less acutely than those at the very bottom.

The US is planning to expand its scheme for refugees from South Africa to 4,500 new applications per month, according to a State Department document seen by the Reuters news agency.

President Trump had previously said Washington would only admit 7,500 refugees from around the world this fiscal year.

Our Africa correspondent Mayani Jones is in Johannesburg.