For three months the lights have gone out across Cuba — not for an hour, not for a night, but for most of every day. On March 16 the entire island of some 11 million people went dark in a complete grid collapse. Six days later it happened again. By April the national grid was producing barely 1,300 megawatts against a peak demand near 3,000, a shortfall so vast that Cubans now cook over firewood in the courtyards of a capital that once styled itself a showcase of revolutionary progress.
The regime in Havana has a ready explanation: Washington. President Miguel Díaz-Canel blames a U.S. "energy blockade," and there is a kernel of fact buried in the propaganda. After American forces captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in January and Caracas halted the roughly 24 percent of Cuba's oil it had been supplying, the island's fuel lifeline frayed. In May the Trump administration designated CUPET, Cuba's state oil monopoly, under a new executive order targeting the energy, defense, mining, financial and security sectors of the Cuban economy.
But to mistake the trigger for the cause is to misread half a century of history. Cuba's power plants are more than 40 years old and have gone without serious capital maintenance for decades. A government that controls every lever of the economy chose, year after year, to let the machinery rot. The blackout is not the work of an embargo. It is the predictable terminal stage of central planning.
Consider where the energy did go. While families wait weeks to fill a gas tank, the state has rationed fuel as an instrument of social control — hoarding supply for the military and security services that keep the Communist Party in power, and keeping the lights burning in dollar-earning tourist hotels even as hospitals postpone surgeries for tens of thousands. The Treasury Department's designation of CUPET noted that key assets of the company were seized decades ago from their rightful American owners. Socialism in Cuba began with confiscation and has ended in darkness. The two facts are related.
The most damning evidence against the regime is not in any U.S. document. It is in the streets of Havana, where ordinary Cubans have built what their government could not. Since the historic protests of July 11, 2021, when thousands marched chanting "libertad," the state has grudgingly licensed more than 10,000 private small and medium enterprises. There are now over 576,000 self-employed Cubans — far too many to dismiss, as the regime likes to, as party-connected elites. They are cooks, mechanics, shopkeepers and software developers who pay better wages than the state, stock shelves the state stores cannot fill and create value out of scarcity.
This is the quiet refutation of six decades of Marxist theory. Given even a sliver of economic freedom, Cubans produce. Denied it, they leave: the island has shed close to 10 percent of its population in recent years, a referendum conducted with suitcases and rafts. Markets are not a foreign imposition on the Cuban character. They are what Cubans reach for the moment the state loosens its grip.
Critics argue, not without force, that the oil blockade also punishes those very entrepreneurs. The cost of trucking a shipping container into Havana has jumped from about $150 to $600, and small firms expect their incomes to fall by half this year. This is real, and it deserves to be said plainly. But the choice to route Cuba's last barrels to the barracks and the beach resorts rather than the bakeries is the regime's, not Washington's. A government that genuinely valued its private sector would not be jailing the journalists and protesters who demand change; Human Rights Watch counts hundreds still detained from the 2021 demonstrations alone. Sanctions raise the price of propping up a police state. They do not require that state to starve its own people of fuel. That decision is made in the Palace of the Revolution.
The stated purpose of sanctions, as the Treasury itself puts it, is not to punish but to change behavior. The leverage works only when it is paired with a clear destination: an end to expropriation, the rule of law, secure property rights and the free enterprise under which Cuba's young entrepreneurs could become an engine of recovery rather than a tolerated nuisance. The same executive authority that blocks CUPET's assets can be lifted the day a government in Havana chooses to honor contracts and let its citizens trade. Washington has even kept a $100 million aid offer on the table. The obstacle to relief has never been a shortage of American willingness. It is a regime that treats its own people's dependence as a feature.
There is a tidy historical irony here. The revolution promised to free the island from reliance on a single patron and a single export. Instead it traded the United States for the Soviet Union, then Venezuela, and now waits for a Russian tanker the way a dying patient waits for a transfusion. Dependency was never capitalism's curse. It was socialism's business model.
The blackouts will end eventually — perhaps when a tanker docks, perhaps when the grid is patched back to a fragile half-capacity. But the lesson should not flicker out with them. A system that cannot keep the lights on after 67 years in power has not been defeated by its enemies. It has been indicted by its own results. The Cubans lighting candles tonight already understand this. So do the half-million of them quietly running businesses the state insists should not work, and do anyway.
The fastest route out of the dark is not another foreign sponsor. It is the freedom to build, to own and to trade — the freedom Cubans keep choosing whenever they are allowed to choose at all.
Cuba Journal Staff writes for Cuba Journal on Dispatches.
