Cuba’s national energy grid suffered a major failure this week, severing power to all eastern provinces and plunging Havana into 24 consecutive hours of blackouts. Cuba’s Energy Minister confirmed the country has completely run out of diesel and fuel oil. Hospitals have struggled to function, food is spoiling, schools and government offices have closed, and hundreds took to Havana’s streets Wednesday night — blocking roads, burning rubbish, and chanting “turn on the lights.” The same day, CIA Director John Ratcliffe led a delegation to Havana for talks with Cuban officials, including a meeting with Raul “Raulito” Rodriguez Castro, grandson of former President Raul Castro and a potential successor to President Miguel Díaz-Canel. The Trump administration simultaneously renewed a $100 million aid offer, conditioned on the aid being distributed through the Catholic Church and independent NGOs — bypassing the Cuban government entirely. Díaz-Canel declared himself conditionally open to accepting, while calling the US energy blockade “genocidal.”
The received wisdom
The progressive critique of US Cuba policy is by now well-rehearsed, and it is not without substance. The American embargo has been in place since the 1960s — longer than most of the people it punishes have been alive. It has demonstrably failed to end communist rule. And in its current, intensified form — with Trump threatening tariffs on any country that supplies Cuba with fuel, cutting off Venezuelan oil, and refusing to allow aid unless it bypasses the state — it is producing what amounts to a collective punishment of eleven million people for the governance failures of a regime they largely did not choose. The UN, human rights organisations, and most of the Western hemisphere’s governments regard the escalation as counterproductive at best and cruel at worst. The Díaz-Canel government’s corruption and political repression are real. But a strategy that causes hospital operations to be cancelled and food to rot in refrigerators is a strategy that generates precisely the kind of anti-American resentment in Cuba and across Latin America that will outlast any individual government.
A different read
That critique has force. And yet it is worth examining what the Trump administration may actually be doing here — and whether, for all its bluntness, it might be working.
The key detail is the CIA Director’s choice of interlocutor in Havana: not Díaz-Canel, but Rodriguez Castro — the grandson of the man who built the Cuban revolutionary state, and a figure who represents, potentially, a post-Díaz-Canel transition. The Trump administration has reportedly pressured Díaz-Canel directly to step down, citing the Venezuela model — where the removal of Nicolás Maduro led to a successor who made concessions on fuel exports and foreign investment. The CIA visit to Havana was not a humanitarian call. It was the infrastructure of a negotiated transition.
Whether this is wise is a different question from whether it is coherent. The historical record of US-engineered transitions in the Caribbean and Latin America is — to put it gently — mixed. The Bay of Pigs, the destabilisation of Allende’s Chile, the Noriega years in Panama: these are not encouraging precedents. The problem is not merely moral; it is operational. When external powers engineer political transitions in authoritarian states, the outcome tends to be determined by whoever has the strongest internal networks and the fastest institutional reflexes — which, in Cuba’s case, may well be elements of the military-security apparatus that have no particular interest in political liberalisation.
There is also the question of proportionality. Cuba produces barely 40% of the fuel needed to power its economy. The grid failure this week was the product of a deliberate strategy: cutting off Venezuelan oil, threatening tariffs on any replacement supplier, and watching the infrastructure slowly collapse. This is, to use an old term, siege warfare. Siege warfare works — eventually, sometimes. It also kills civilians, destroys the social capital that any post-authoritarian recovery would need, and tends to harden the resolve of precisely the ruling class it targets while immiserating the population it claims to be helping.
The $100 million aid offer, conditioned on distribution through non-state channels, is a clever instrument: it puts Díaz-Canel in the position of either accepting a mechanism that bypasses his government (and thus visibly demonstrates its weakness) or refusing aid that the population desperately needs (and thus demonstrating his indifference to their suffering). It is the foreign-policy equivalent of making an adversary choose between the sword and the wall. The question is whether the Cuban government is genuinely in the position of weakness that this strategy assumes. If it still commands enough loyalty from key elements of the security services, it can absorb the pressure indefinitely, blaming Washington for everything — and the CIA’s visible presence in Havana gives it more ammunition, not less.
The deeper irony is that the Trump administration’s stated goal — regime change in Havana — is arguably the most achievable it has been since 1959. The energy crisis is genuinely existential. Public unrest is at levels not seen in years. Díaz-Canel has no charisma to compensate for the privations he presides over. But “achievable” and “wisely managed” are not synonyms.
What to watch
Watch whether the $100 million aid package is formally accepted, and on what terms — the distribution mechanism is the critical variable. Watch the rate of public unrest in Havana over the coming days; if protests grow beyond Tuesday night’s scale, the security services’ response will be a leading indicator of the regime’s cohesion. Watch for any signal from Rodriguez Castro or other figures within the Cuban establishment about the CIA visit’s content; the fact that the meeting happened at all is significant, but what was proposed matters more. And watch whether any third country — Mexico, the EU, or a BRICS member — moves to supply emergency fuel, testing the Trump administration’s willingness to impose threatened tariffs on a strategic partner.
— J