Cuba's Grid Collapses Again, and the Lights Go Out Island-Wide
A weekend of rolling outages ended in a full blackout, as fuel shortages tied to U.S. sanctions strain an aging power system
By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
The failure, when it came, was total. Cuba's national power grid collapsed on Sunday, plunging the island into a nationwide blackout after a weekend already marked by rolling outages, according to Al Jazeera.
The immediate cause was mechanical: an old and undermaintained grid, the kind that has failed before in recent years, finally gave way under strain. But the deeper cause is a fuel shortage that Al Jazeera reports has been worsened by U.S.-imposed restrictions on the fuel Cuba needs to keep its power plants running. Havana has leaned for years on shipments of subsidized oil, much of it historically from Venezuela, to keep generators turning. When those shipments falter, or sanctions tighten the margins further, the grid has little slack left to absorb the shock.
This is not Cuba's first island-wide blackout. The country's power system, much of it decades old, has buckled repeatedly in recent years, each time forcing millions of households into days without refrigeration, water pumps, or light. For ordinary Cubans, a blackout is not an inconvenience so much as a cascading failure — spoiled food, stalled hospitals, businesses that cannot open.
Washington's sanctions regime is built to squeeze the Cuban government's finances and, by extension, its capacity to govern. What it also squeezes, directly, is the fuel supply that keeps lights on in Havana apartments and rural clinics alike. That is the blunt arithmetic of embargoes: the pressure meant for a government lands first on the people who did not choose it.
[Editor's note: This report relies on a single wire account from Al Jazeera; further confirmation of the blackout's scope and duration was not available at press time.]
Nothing happens 'over there' anymore.
— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera.
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