Cuba Suffers Another Nationwide Blackout as US Fuel Restrictions Bite

Cuba's national electrical grid collapsed on Sunday after a weekend of rolling outages, leaving the entire island without power. Al Jazeera reported the failure came amid US-imposed fuel shortages that have left Cuba struggling to keep its power stations running.

Cuba's grid depends on aging, Soviet-era plants and has suffered repeated total failures over the past year, each affecting roughly ten million people. The immediate cause is a chronic fuel shortage. Cuban officials attribute it to the effective US blockade on fuel shipments, worsened after a US operation earlier in the year that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and halted Venezuelan oil exports, cutting off a key supplier.

The competing accounts are stark. Havana describes the crisis as the direct result of US economic pressure. Washington describes its sanctions as leverage against governments it opposes. Both can be true at the same time. The sanctions are working as intended to deprive the target of fuel, and the humanitarian and economic collapse that follows is the intended result.

The episode is a case study in how energy statecraft translates into the physical breakdown of a national economy, with power, water and food distribution all dependent on the same scarce diesel.