Cuba runs on imported oil, and this year the imports stopped. After US forces removed Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro in early January, the Venezuelan crude that had supplied roughly a fifth of Cuba's energy ended abruptly; Washington, which had already moved to block tankers bound for the island — the first effective US blockade of Cuba since the Missile Crisis, by the New York Times' reckoning — tightened the cordon and threatened tariffs on any country that tried to fill the gap. Cuban oil imports fell to effectively zero in January, the first time since 2015. Two small tankers reached the island in the entire first quarter; intermittent Russian deliveries have covered a week to ten days at a time.
The grid did what a starved, aging, over-centralised grid does: it fell over, repeatedly. Cuba suffered total national blackouts in March, one of them lasting nearly thirty hours and dropping all eleven million people into darkness at once. Generation deficits ran between 1,500 and 2,000 megawatts — at the worst moments close to half of national demand — and the failures returned through the spring, with outages in much of the country now routinely stretching eighteen to twenty-two hours a day. The proximate cause is fuel, but the fragility is older: plants more than forty years old, a single large station whose failure cascades across the whole island, domestic crude too heavy to burn cleanly, and renewables still under five percent of the mix.
The human ledger is the part that does not make the front pages. The UN counts roughly 96,000 surgeries backed up, 11,000 of them for children; immunisation delayed for thousands of infants; about a million people dependent on water trucked by diesel that is itself in short supply. Hospitals run on emergency generators when the diesel lasts. Refrigerated food and medicine spoil. Rubbish goes uncollected because the trucks have no fuel; in Havana people have gone back to cooking on firewood. Relief efforts already strained by Hurricane Melissa are short tens of millions of dollars.
The politics are not subtle, and should not be flattened either way. The blackouts have brought Cubans into the streets — protests in Havana neighbourhoods this spring met with cut internet and deployed police. Havana blames American "financial and energy persecution"; Washington, which has offered a hundred million dollars in aid even as it maintains the blockade, is candid that the pressure is aimed at political change on the island by year's end. The honest accounting is that the United States did not build Cuba's broken grid — decades of underinvestment and heavy crude did that — but the blockade removed the last thin margin that kept the lights on at all, and did so deliberately.
What makes this a Waypoint story is the same thing that made Tuvalu one in Where the Fuel Stops: a small island is where the world's energy politics lands first and lands hardest. Cuba's ten million people are, functionally, leverage in a contest with a third country. The lights going out in Havana are a foreign-policy instrument — and they connect directly to the strait at the other end of this edition, where oil is again the weapon and the civilian is again the collateral.
Sources
The blockade and the cutoff. US forces removed Maduro in early January 2026, ending Venezuelan oil shipments (≈20–24% of Cuba's energy, ~26,500–35,000 bpd); the US has blocked tankers to Cuba since February — described by the NYT as the first effective blockade since the Missile Crisis — and Executive Order 14380 (30 January) authorised tariffs on countries supplying Cuban oil; imports hit ~zero in January, with only two small vessels in Q1 (Wikipedia "2026 Cuban crisis"; ABC News; Military.com).
The grid collapse. Total national blackouts occurred in March 2026 (including a ~29.5-hour collapse affecting ~11 million); Q1 deficits ran 1,500–2,000 MW; outages now routinely last 18–22 hours/day; structural causes include 40-year-old plants, a highly centralised grid, heavy domestic crude, and renewables under 5% (Electric Choice; Wikipedia "2024–2026 Cuba blackouts"; NPR; UAB Institute for Human Rights).
The humanitarian toll. The UN reports ~96,000 backlogged surgeries (11,000 for children), delayed immunisations, and ~1 million people reliant on diesel-constrained water trucking; aid efforts face a ~$68M funding gap atop Hurricane Melissa recovery (UN News; ABC News).
The politics. Spring protests met internet cuts and police deployment; Díaz-Canel blames US "financial and energy persecution"; the US has offered $100M in aid while maintaining the blockade as part of a stated regime-change aim (ABC News; Military.com; Wikipedia).
Further Reading
Military.com / US-policy coverage — the administration's rationale: maximum pressure aimed at political change in Havana and Caracas.
UAB Institute for Human Rights and Electric Choice — the structural case: the grid was failing before the blockade, and would still fail without it.
UN News and ABC News — the humanitarian and on-the-ground human picture.
Where the Fuel Stops (The Waypoint) — the companion small-island energy-shock story from this edition's Pacific beat.