The lights went out in Cuba long before America turned off the taps

ON THE EVENING of Sunday August 2nd, Cuba's state-run electric utility, UNE, posted a terse announcement on the social network X: the national grid had collapsed once again. It was the fourth island-wide blackout since early July, and the eighth since late 2024. About 10 million people were plunged into darkness, then into a slow and partial restoration that begins, as it always does, with isolated micro-grids for hospitals and water pumps.

The headline this time, as it has been before, blames Washington. The United States imposed an oil blockade on Cuba in January, after its military operation removed Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, from power. Venezuela had long been Cuba's primary supplier of subsidised fuel. Under American pressure, Mexico followed suit. Since January, only one oil tanker - Russian, carrying 730,000 barrels in late March - has been allowed to dock. The Cuban energy minister declared in May that the country had run out of crude oil and diesel.

That is true. It is also not the whole story. A fuel blockade can cripple an already weak power system. It cannot cause a system to collapse on its own unless that system was already standing on crumbling foundations. Cuba's grid was failing long before the taps were turned off. The blockade is an accelerant, not the root cause.

The foundations were hollowed out by deliberate choices. Cuba's electricity generation is dominated by thermoelectric plants - almost all of them Soviet-era, many more than 30 years old. IEEE Spectrum, an engineering magazine, notes that the grid's old protection systems cannot detect faults, and there are insufficient spinning reserves (standby generators that keep a grid stable when one plant trips) to compensate. When a single plant fails, the whole system goes dark. That is not the mark of an efficient economy under siege. It is the mark of a system that has not been maintained.

Fuel quality has made matters worse. Cuba's domestic oil is high-sulfur heavy crude, which corrodes boilers, turbines and pipes. This has shortened the lifespan of equipment already decades old. In the first five months of 2025, only 34% of Cuba's thermal power capacity was available on an average daily basis, according to 2023 baseline figures, as reported by IEEE. By 2023 the government could no longer afford the leasing fees for eight floating power plants it had brought in from Turkey and elsewhere to shore up deficits. They were withdrawn, taking hundreds of megawatts with them.

None of this is an act of God. It is the result of priorities. According to Cuba's own National Statistics Office, the government spent about 32% of total investment from 2010 to 2024 on tourism infrastructure. Only 12% went to energy. In a country producing roughly 40% of the oil it consumes, as the International Energy Agency estimated in 2023, the arithmetic was never going to work. The regime chose hotels over power plants. Now it wants to have both, and neither.

The American side, for its part, is no paragon of statesmanship. The blockade, imposed via executive order and enforced by threatening third countries with punitive tariffs, has been condemned by UN human-rights experts as a violation of international law. The State Department's offer of $100 million in aid, conditional on democratic reforms, is a political gesture more than a credible lifeline. Mr Trump's administration frames the measures as pressure for elections and the release of political prisoners. The result is also a humanitarian catastrophe: water supplies disrupted, medical procedures delayed, food spoiled, schools closed. To inflict suffering on ordinary Cubans as leverage is a form of coercion that few liberal democracies would defend, even against a despotic regime.

But the utility of a sanctions policy should be judged by whether it changes the target's behaviour in a desirable direction, not by whether it produces misery. On that score, the blockade's record is poor. It has not made the Cuban government more democratic. It has not opened the economy. It has made life unbearable for 10 million people who did not vote for the Castro brothers.

The deeper problem is that Havana's leaders have no incentive to reform even under pressure. A command economy, run largely by a military conglomerate, has survived precisely because it controls the scarcity that sanctions create. When everything is rationed, the state that holds the ration coupons is the one with power. The regime can blame Washington for the darkness, and many Cubans, with some reason, will believe it. What they cannot see is that the darkness was coming regardless, because the lights were never going to be kept on by an economic model that had spent decades decapitalising its own infrastructure.

To be sure, the United States bears responsibility for the speed and severity of the current crisis. Cutting off 90% of Cuba's fuel supply in a matter of months was a decision with predictable consequences. A state that produces less than half the oil it needs cannot be expected to power itself on willpower.

Yet the American blockade also reveals a trap that liberal democracies repeatedly fall into. They assume that economic pressure on an authoritarian regime will produce liberalisation. More often it produces consolidation. Scarcity strengthens the hand of the state that controls distribution. It also drives allies into the arms of adversaries. Cuba's pivot to renewable energy - 32 photovoltaic parks now operating, with a further 19 wind farms under construction, much of it backed by Chinese investment - is a survival strategy, not a market reform. It will reduce Cuba's dependence on imported fuel, which may well make the blockade less effective over time. The irony is that the American pressure campaign is accelerating Cuba's move away from fossil fuels. Washington gets credit for nothing except dark summer nights.

The better answer would be to separate humanitarian access from political leverage. Fuel for power generation is not a luxury. A liberal approach to a repressive neighbour would ease the blockade on energy while tightening pressure on human rights through targeted sanctions on regime insiders. It would also extend an offer of genuine trade and investment that rewards Cuban entrepreneurs, not state monopolies. The United States has done none of this. It has chosen the bluntest instrument available and then complained when the regime grows more, not less, defiant.

Cuba, for its part, faces a choice it has long avoided. Solar and wind can help, but they cannot prop up a grid whose wiring and substations are as old as the revolution. The country needs massive investment in transmission infrastructure, independent of whether the power comes from oil or the sun. It needs private enterprise to manage and maintain that infrastructure. It needs to stop pretending that the problem is America and the solution is more state control. Neither claim holds water.

The lights went out in Cuba long before America turned off the taps. Turning them back on will require more than blaming Washington.