Cuba’s Slow Collapse: Blackouts, Hunger, and a Regime Running Out of Road

Since late 2024, the island has endured repeated total grid collapses, rolling blackouts lasting 18 or more hours a day, and a fuel shortage so acute that its aging power plants cannot meet even half of the country’s electricity demand, the worst living crisis the island has seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.Now, with the Trump administration having severed Cuba’s Venezuelan oil lifeline, indicted former President Raúl Castro, and dangled $100 million in aid it knows Havana is unlikely to accept, the question pressing on nearly 11 million Cubans is not whether their government can fix this — it is whether Washington wants it to.“One can make the argument that the economic trouble Cuba is currently facing is worse than the Special Period in the 1990s,” fellow at Defense Priorities Dan DePetris tells the New York Sun. “Back then, the Cubans were still able to receive fairly standard rates of fuel from the likes of Mexico, which viewed Cuba’s economic collapse at the time through a humanitarian lens. Today, those shipments are essentially cut off due to United States policy, which means that everything from food delivery to hospital operations is severely impacted.”Venezuela had been propping up Cuba’s lights for years, shipping roughly 20 percent of the island’s total energy imports in exchange for Cuban doctors and intelligence support. That arrangement ended abruptly in January, when United States forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The oil stopped moving almost immediately.In March, Cuba’s Ministry of Energy and Mines confirmed a “complete disconnection” of the island’s electrical system. President Díaz-Canel acknowledged that the island had not received oil shipments in more than three months and was operating on solar power, natural gas, and what little its crumbling thermoelectric plants could still generate.A single Russian tanker that arrived in late March offered a brief reprieve before those supplies ran out within weeks. By mid-May, Cuba’s energy minister was telling the country on state television: “We have absolutely no fuel, oil, and absolutely no diesel.” At the same time, the United States embassy in Havana issued a security alert warning that the national electrical grid “is increasingly unstable,” with blackouts in some areas now lasting up to 20 hours a day.Senior UN officials from OCHA and the World Health Organization, speaking after a three-day visit to the island in May, warned that more than 100,000 patients are waiting for surgeries delayed by power outages and supply shortages, with blood banks, laboratories, and ambulance services all severely disrupted. The scale of the medical collapse has since come into sharper focus: the survival rate for children with cancer has fallen to 65 percent from 85 percent before the energy restrictions began in January, according to Cuban state media. Some 100,000 children under seven are no longer receiving the daily liter of milk previously provided by the state, the country’s 16-vaccine immunization program for infants is at risk, and nearly 3,000 kidney dialysis patients have had their treatment schedules disrupted. Of the 395 essential medicines produced on the island, 300 are unavailable due to a lack of chemical components. A grid beyond repairCuba’s infrastructure crisis, however, did not begin this year. The country’s oil-run electric power plants are more than 40 years old and have undergone very little capital maintenance. The January fuel cutoff did not create the crisis; it exposed one that had been building for years through neglect, mismanagement, and chronic underinvestment. Independent experts estimate Cuba would need between $8 billion and $10 billion to modernize its energy infrastructure — a sum the government plainly does not have.Havana has blamed the United States embargo, on the books since 1960, for strangling its ability to modernize the grid and tap international capital. Critics point out that the island also spent decades betting everything on cheap Venezuelan oil rather than building any real energy alternatives, a gamble that has now come due.Either way, the bill is being paid by ordinary Cubans. State companies have moved to a four-day work week. Buses between provinces have been cut. Hotels sit dark. Universities have been barely functioning since February. Last month, the government quietly announced it was ending the school year weeks ahead of schedule — the Education Ministry admitting that asking children to sit in classrooms after spending entire nights without electricity was no longer workable.Senior UN officials, following a three-day visit to the island in May, warned that the humanitarian situation will worsen, and could collapse, if Cuba’s oil needs go unmet.In response to the emergency, Mr. Díaz-Canel invoked the “Zero Option” — a contingency plan originally drafted by Fidel Castro during the Special Period for a hypothetical no-oil scenario, involving extreme rationing, local food self-sufficiency, and animal traction for transport. He announced a monthly per-person ration of 7 pounds of rice and prioritized the consumption of locally produced goods.For many Cubans who lived through the 1990s, the announcement landed less as a plan than as an admission.“Cuba’s productive apparatus and infrastructure for electricity generation has deteriorated significantly, combined with an almost complete loss of access to oil,” Research professor of Latin American studies at the United States Army War College Strategic Studies Institute Evan Ellis tells the Sun, highlighting that the situation is arguably worse than it was three decades ago.“Cubans have lost even more faith in the ability of their regime to deliver, following more than six decades of failed communist rule, the passing of the original revolutionary generation, and the collapse of other sources of sustaining economic activity.”Hunger as the new normalIn Havana’s markets, rice that cost 200 pesos two months ago now runs 300. The Food Monitor Program, which surveyed five provinces in April, found that 78 percent of Cubans believe what they are living through now is already worse than the Special Period, the decade of rationing and hunger that followed the Soviet collapse.By April, the group estimated that nearly 97 percent of the population lacked adequate access to food due to inflation and collapsed purchasing power.For Cuban children, hunger is no longer an emergency — it is simply the condition of growing up. UNICEF has, for the first time, included Cuba in its global analysis of child food poverty, finding that 9 percent of children under five suffer from severe nutritional deprivation. Nearly half of Cuban students aged six to eleven receive neither meals nor snacks at school. Grandparents are raising many children because their parents have emigrated to send money home, absent not by choice, but by necessity.The World Food Program has warned that the cut in Venezuelan fuel supplies is disrupting food distribution across the island, while hampering recovery from last year’s Hurricane Melissa. Cuba imports between 70 and 80 percent of the food it consumes — meaning the government’s monthly ration basket, already barely enough to cover a week, depends almost entirely on the outside world to deliver it.Those who study Cuba closely draw a direct line between the current collapse and the crisis that followed the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the same abrupt loss of a patron, the same cascade of shortages. However, there is a critical difference this time. In the 1990s, other countries were free to step in, and some did.Today, Washington has warned of tariffs against any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba, meaning any nation that tries to help faces economic punishment from the United States.“The difference today is that the United States is imposing an oil blockade to prevent any oil imports, drastically exacerbating the crisis,” Professor of government and Latin American politics specialist at American University William LeoGrande tells the Sun.Criminalizing survivalWith no meaningful political outlet available, Cubans have taken to the streets, and the regime has met them with handcuffs. Protests have erupted daily across the island since early March, with the banging of pots, burning of trash, and chants against the government echoing through Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Matanzas, and beyond.The most dramatic flashpoint came on March 13, when demonstrators in Morón stormed and set fire to the local Communist Party headquarters, a scene that landed like a signal flare across the island. The response was swift and heavy-handed.Rights organization Cubalex documented at least 85 arrests in March alone, including at least two teenagers. Amnesty International has warned that while Cuba announced a pardon of more than 2,000 prisoners in April, its largest amnesty in a decade, human rights organizations have been unable to verify the release of anyone detained specifically for protesting, and none of Amnesty’s recognized prisoners of conscience have been freed.The pattern of repression tells its own story about how much confidence the government has in its own survival.“The regime is aware that it cannot survive without resorting to its repressive tactics,” assistant teaching professor of political science at Florida International University Daniel Pedreira tells the Sun. “The younger generation of Cubans does not believe in communism or in the revolution, and as a result they have been the most impacted by arrests in recent years.”Others are continuing to find avenues of escape. “Mass migration has acted as a pressure valve that helps the regime stay in power, but it is also accelerating the country’s long-term collapse as workers, and the productive demographic leaves the island,” Maria Fernanda Bozmoski, director of impact and operations at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, tells the Sun. “With Russia and Iran engaged in their own conflicts, the survival of the regime is really questionable. U.S. actions in the past few weeks and going forward are not just about Cuba, but about the broader network of adversaries that benefit from keeping Cuba isolated, dependent, and strategically useful.”Meanwhile, Washington’s pressure campaign has only widened. On May 20, a federal grand jury indicted 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro on four counts of murder and conspiracy tied to the 1996 downing of two planes operated by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue.CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana and offered $100 million in humanitarian aid conditioned on meaningful reforms, to be distributed through the Catholic Church and independent organizations. Cuba’s foreign minister called the offer “a fable.”Then, on June 5, a United States deadline expired requiring all foreign companies to sever ties with GAESA, the Cuban military conglomerate that controls between 40 and 70 percent of the island’s economy, or face secondary sanctions. Major hotel chains including Canada’s Blue Diamond Resorts and Spain’s Meliá and Iberostar have already pulled out. One Cuban economist called 2026 “the worst year in Cuba’s economic history in the past 70 years.”Since 2021, more than one million Cubans, roughly 10 percent of the population, have left the island, most of them working-age adults. The hollowing-out compounds every other crisis: fewer workers, fewer remittances, fewer people left to sustain what little economic activity survives the blackouts. Mr. DePetris says the regime has deep experience in muddling through, and will try to preserve what little cash it has “to keep various elite constituencies on-side, even as the Cuban population suffers.”For millions of Cubans enduring another sleepless, hungry, lightless night, the question is no longer whether the system is failing — it is how much longer the darkness lasts.“History is rhyming here,” Mr. Ellis adds, “but this time it’s arguably much worse.”

Cuba’s Slow Collapse: Blackouts, Hunger, and a Regime Running Out of Road

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