Loading...
Cuba makes its electricity in oil-fired plants built with Soviet help half a century ago, fed for twenty years by Venezuelan crude supplied on easy terms in exchange for Cuban doctors. The plants were already failing, and the whole grid had collapsed several times, when in January 2026 the United States removed Venezuela's president, stopped that oil, and threatened anyone else who sold fuel to the island. Since then Cuba has run out of diesel, the national grid has gone down repeatedly, and hospitals, water pumps, buses and food storage have failed with it.
The wider conflict and each side's full account: Cuba and the United States.
On 18 September 2026 Cuba's national electricity grid collapsed, leaving millions without power. The grid collapsed again the next day. Reporting attributed the second blackout to a fuel blockade by the United States. Both events fall within the same month as the dossier's as-of date, and no vote, ruling, treaty, leadership change or policy taking effect is recorded for this period.
Whose fault. The plants were breaking down before any tanker was stopped. The tankers were stopped by a deliberate act of American policy. Each government points only to the other half.
Whether fuel is a legitimate target. Washington says oil is the government's lifeline and cutting it the fastest way to change. International humanitarian bodies say a fuel blockade cannot distinguish a ministry from a maternity ward.
What comes first. Havana asks for fuel and then talks. Washington offers fuel for political change, most recently, by reports, for the president's removal.
The Cuban government ran its power stations into the ground while its generals built luxury hotels that stand empty. It paid for oil by renting out its doctors and its security services to Venezuela's dictatorship. That arrangement is over. The United States let a Russian tanker through when it judged the need acute, and has offered more in return for real change. The quickest end to the blackouts is for those in charge to step aside.
The United States has imposed an oil blockade on an island, in peacetime, and threatened every supplier with ruin. It then points at the darkness as proof that socialism has failed. Cuba's plants are old because for sixty years it could not buy parts or borrow to replace them. Its doctors and teachers work by candlelight, its people share what they have, and the country has not broken. This is collective punishment, and the world knows its name.
Washington's leaves out that stopping a country's fuel stops its ambulances and incubators; that the offer of oil for a change of president treats a humanitarian supply as ransom; and that the people hurt are the ones it calls captives of the government.
Havana's leaves out that the grid collapsed nationwide several times in 2024 and 2025 before the blockade; that the state spent far more on hotels in those years than on power plants or farms; and that it kept no reserve and no second supplier because cheap Venezuelan oil spared it the choice.
The aid agencies' and the Church's leaves out that relief delivered through the Cuban state also sustains it, which is Washington's objection, and that neither government will let aid be separated from politics.
Cook with charcoal, queue for water, watch food rot, and leave if they can.
Names and terms the sides do not share. This page keeps them out of its own voice.
Per-week distribution of events. Click a bar to see that week's top events.
Click a week bar to select. Light blue = active week.
United StatesWhatever the causes, the fact is an emergency: operations postponed, insulin and food spoiling, water not pumped, the old and the sick at risk. Fuel for hospitals and water should not be a bargaining chip for either government.
