Cuba experienced its third nationwide blackout of 2026 on Monday, with residents describing conditions of severe hardship as power plants remain starved of fuel, according to The Guardian’s report. The blackouts have become a defining feature of Cuban life in the mid-2020s: rolling outages of ten or more hours per day have been common for years, but nationwide collapses represent a qualitative deterioration. The Guardian quotes a Cuban resident: “Living like this is agony.” The proximate cause is fuel shortage, with the Trump administration’s oil blockade imposed in January having depleted reserves for power generation. Against this backdrop, the Cuban national zoo separately celebrated the birth of Bengal tiger cubs — a surreal juxtaposition that captures something essential about Cuba’s particular predicament.
The received wisdom
The dominant international left framing attributes Cuba’s crisis almost entirely to American sanctions. The logic runs: Cuba was a functioning, if impoverished, society before the intensification of US pressure; the Trump oil blockade has directly caused the fuel shortage driving the blackouts; and any honest assessment of Cuban suffering must assign primary blame to American foreign policy. Advocates for lifting sanctions argue that the Cuban government, however authoritarian, is being denied the resources to provide basic services to its population, and that ordinary Cubans rather than the regime bear the costs.
This framing has traction in Latin America and much of the European left, and it is not entirely without foundation. The US embargo has been in place in various forms since 1962 and has unquestionably constrained Cuba’s economic options. Recent intensifications — particularly the Trump administration’s fuel restrictions — have demonstrably worsened the energy crisis. Any analysis that ignores the sanctions dimension is incomplete.
A different read
The problem with the sanctions-first framing is that it forecloses the harder and more important question: why, after sixty-five years of the Cuban revolutionary government, does the island’s energy infrastructure remain so brittle that a fuel supply disruption can extinguish power nationwide?
Cuba inherited a reasonably functional electricity system. The Soviet Union subsidised the island’s economy for three decades, providing oil at below-market prices that kept the lights on through the 1970s and 1980s. When that subsidy ended with the USSR’s collapse in 1991, Cuba entered the “Special Period” — a genuine catastrophe of hunger and energy shortage that the government managed with some resilience. Venezuela then stepped in as the new subsidiser under Chávez, providing cheap oil for years. Now Venezuela’s own production has collapsed and the US has reimposed restrictions.
The pattern here is instructive: Cuba’s energy system has never been reformed to function without subsidy. Successive Cuban governments have managed political survival by securing external patrons willing to provide below-market energy, and have used that arrangement to avoid the structural reforms — private enterprise, market pricing, diversified generation, foreign investment in infrastructure — that would build genuine resilience. The blackouts are not primarily a product of American malice. They are the predictable result of a system optimised for political control rather than economic functionality, catching up with reality whenever a patron withdraws.
Compare Cuba with other small island economies that face no subsidies and maintain reasonably reliable electricity. They do so through market-based utilities, diversified generation (including renewables), and frameworks that attract private investment. Cuba has rejected all of these on ideological grounds for six decades. The Guardian’s report quotes Cubans experiencing what amounts to a humanitarian crisis in slow motion — and the honest question is whether the lifting of US sanctions, while warranted on liberty grounds, would actually fix the structural dysfunction that makes Cuba’s infrastructure so fragile.
There is a defensible case for easing sanctions independent of this analysis: collective punishment of ordinary citizens for their government’s ideology is poor policy and poor ethics. But that case should be made honestly, without pretending that economic liberalisation imposed from outside can substitute for internal reform. A Cuba that receives oil without political conditionality but continues to suppress private enterprise and reject market pricing will experience the next blackout within a few years of the next patron’s political difficulties.
The tiger cubs born in the Havana zoo amid fuel shortages are an apt symbol: the Cuban state has historically maintained prestige projects — literacy campaigns, free healthcare, the zoo — while failing to deliver the material infrastructure of modernity. Pride is not electricity.
What to watch
Watch whether the blackout crisis produces any relaxation of internal economic controls — small-scale private enterprise in energy services, for instance — as a pragmatic concession to reality. Cuba has made such concessions before under duress. Watch also for any diplomatic movement on US-Cuba relations under the current administration, and whether European or Latin American intermediaries attempt to facilitate an energy supply arrangement that bypasses the US blockade. The human cost of the current trajectory — emigration is already at historic highs — creates political pressure on the regime that may eventually force genuine reforms.
— J