Cuba hit with another blackout as millions across the island are left without electricity

By Emilio Quesada · Reporting from Miami · September 19, 2026

The darkness that swallowed Cuba on Friday, September 18, 2026, was not an act of God, nor was it a mere technical glitch.

The darkness that swallowed Cuba on Friday, September 18, 2026, was not an act of God, nor was it a mere technical glitch. As reported by the Los Angeles Daily News, the collapse began with a failure in transmission lines in the west, extending into Matanzas province, which effectively severed the island's eastern section. By dusk, the AP News reports that only 5% of Havana’s 862,000 customers had power restored. For millions, the result is a familiar, grinding misery: no water, no internet, and the suffocating silence of a failed state.

To the casual observer, this is a tragedy of infrastructure. To those of us who read the world through the lens of leverage, it is a stress test. Since January, President Donald Trump has imposed an energy blockade designed to starve the Cuban political system of the fuel and replacement parts it needs to sustain its obsolete thermoelectric plants. The arithmetic is simple: the United States has decided that the cost of maintaining the status quo is higher than the cost of forcing a collapse.

The Shield of the Blockade

The most capable advocates for the Cuban regime—and the credulous voices in Washington—will argue that the United States is the sole architect of this suffering. They will point to the fact that only one Russian tanker of fuel has reached the island since January as proof that American policy is a humanitarian weapon. They will cite the desperation of people like Mercedes Rodriguez, a 60-year-old worker in Havana, who told AP News that "there are no words for what we’re going through."

This argument is a convenient fiction. It mistakes the catalyst for the cause. The blockade did not build the obsolete infrastructure; the Communist Party did. The blockade did not create the "severe economic crisis" that has made grid collapses common over the last two years; the regime’s systemic theft and mismanagement did.

We have seen this mechanism before in the Iran energy crisis. In Iran, international sanctions and external blockades targeting the energy sector created critical shortages of fuel and parts, leading to widespread outages. Yet, the shared mechanism is not the sanction, but the parasitic relationship between the state and the grid. Just as the IRGC in Iran prioritizes cryptocurrency mining over the electricity needs of its citizens, the Cuban regime prioritizes the survival of its security apparatus over the water pumps of Havana. In both cases, the regime uses the external blockade as a political shield, blaming the "empire" for the darkness while they hold the only remaining keys to the generator.

The Pattern of Systemic Decay

The collapse of the Cuban grid is not an isolated event; it is a chapter in a long record of authoritarian atrophy. We saw the same trajectory during the Venezuelan power outage of 2019, where a combination of sanctions and crumbling infrastructure left a nation in the dark. We saw it in the 2023 energy crisis in Lebanon, where political instability rendered the national grid a ghost. These are not "unprecedented" failures; they are the inevitable dividends of states that treat public utilities as spoils of war.

The regime’s official newspaper, Granma, attempted to blame "unstable" weather conditions. This is the standard liturgy of the failing state. Whether it is the 2022 Pakistan floods or the Sri Lankan economic crisis of 2021, the pattern is identical: the state blames nature or foreigners for a fragility they spent decades cultivating.

The reality is that the Cuban people are being used as collateral in a high-stakes game of chicken. When Abilén Marrero, a homemaker in Havana, tells reporters, "Maybe it’ll come back this afternoon or tomorrow—there’s no way to know," she is describing the psychological state of a population that has been conditioned to accept the unacceptable.

The Cost of Comfort

The United States is currently testing the regime's breaking point. But leverage only works if there is a viable alternative for the population to pivot toward. If the blockade merely increases the misery of the citizen without providing a path to a transition, it risks creating a vacuum that Russia—which provided that lone tanker in March—is all too happy to fill with just enough fuel to keep the regime's police force operational.

The wing of the Republican party that favors isolationism would suggest we simply walk away. They are wrong. American power is a load-bearing wall; when we abdicate our role in the hemisphere, we don't create peace, we create dependencies on Moscow and Beijing.

The current strategy of energy strangulation is a necessary pressure, but it is not a strategy for victory. If the goal is a Havana that elects its own government, the U.S. must ensure that the darkness does not simply harden the regime's resolve to survive on scraps. A blockade can break a grid, but it cannot, by itself, build a democracy. Unless the pressure of the blackout is met with a credible, supported alternative for the Cuban people, the regime will continue to let millions suffer in the dark, knowing that the people's hatred is directed at the blockade, not the men who let the lights go out.

Cuba hit with another blackout as millions across the island are left without electricity

The Shield of the Blockade

The Pattern of Systemic Decay

The Cost of Comfort

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