US blockades strangle Cuba, turning blackouts into a siege
By Josie Calloway · Reporting from Pittsburgh ·
I spent a decade in ERs where the most dangerous thing in the room wasn't the trauma—it was the systemic failure that sent the patient there in the first place.
I spent a decade in ERs where the most dangerous thing in the room wasn't the trauma—it was the systemic failure that sent the patient there in the first place. You learn to read the chart, not the press release. And right now, the chart for Cuba is screaming.
On Friday, September 18, 2026, the island’s electrical grid suffered a total collapse. According to the BBC, this was a "total disconnection" that left millions in the dark. In Havana, the Energy Ministry reported that only 5% of the city had power. For some provinces, the blackout stretched past 60 hours. When the grid goes, everything else follows: the water pumps stop, the cooking gas vanishes, and the hospitals start praying their backup generators hold.
Lidia Fernandez, a 36-year-old schoolteacher, told AFP that it’s "one thing after another" and she doesn't know how they haven't gone crazy. Mercedes Rodriguez, 60, put it more bluntly to DW: "The country is in such a sad state, and there are no words for what we're going through." This isn't a fluke; it's the 7th nationwide blackout this year and the 12th since late 2024.
The US government, under Donald Trump, wants you to believe this is simply the inevitable rot of a state-run economic model. That is the strongest case the Washington hawks can make: that Cuba’s UNE is incompetent, the infrastructure is ancient, and the regime is eating itself from the inside. And they aren't entirely wrong about the rust. We saw the same cocktail of poor maintenance and brain drain trigger the Venezuelan blackout of 2019.
But here is the clinical truth: you cannot repair a grid when the parts are illegal to ship and the fuel is a crime to sell. Since January 2026, the US has imposed a brutal oil blockade and tightened sanctions. Cuba’s backup plants run on imported diesel. For years, Venezuela provided about 35,000 barrels a day—half of what the island needs. Then the US seized President Nicolás Maduro in January, and the oil stopped.
When you cut off the fuel and the replacement parts, you aren't "pressuring a regime." You are strangling a population. United Nations human rights experts have already called this blockade a violation of international law, warning that Cuba is becoming a "silent Gaza."
You Can't Patch a Grid With Sanctions
In the ER, if a patient is crashing because they can't afford insulin, I don't spend my time lecturing them on the "inefficiency" of their diet. I get them the medicine. The US is doing the opposite here. Washington attributes the outages to internal failure, while simultaneously seizing oil shipments and threatening tariffs on anyone who dares to help Havana.
This is a strategy of calculated deprivation. We’ve seen this playbook before. During the Venezuelan crisis (2019-2021), the US used targeted economic sanctions to create humanitarian distress in the hopes of triggering a political pivot. It didn't save the people; it just increased the mortality rate. It’s the same logic used in the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022-2024), where the electrical grid was systematically targeted to destabilize the civilian population. The only difference is that the US is doing it with paperwork and blockades instead of missiles.
The result is a poverty rate that has spiked from 45% in mid-2025 to an estimated 66% today. When 66% of your people are in poverty and the lights won't stay on for more than an hour—as Frank Lorenzo told Reuters—you aren't looking at a "model failure." You're looking at a siege.
A History of Sudden Silence
This isn't an unprecedented collapse; it is a repeat of the Special Period in Cuba. In the early 1990s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union stripped Cuba of its primary external energy and resource provider, triggering a systemic collapse of infrastructure and widespread civilian deprivation. The mechanism is identical: a sudden loss of a lifeline creates a vacuum that the domestic system cannot fill, leading to a spiral of scarcity.
The Special Period eventually eased when Hugo Chávez's Venezuela stepped in. Now, the US has ensured there is no new lifeline. By seizing Maduro and blockading the oil, the Trump administration has intentionally recreated the conditions of the 1990s, but with a more aggressive endgame.
We saw a similar erasure of civilian stability during the 2006 Lebanon war, where the failure of power and water was the direct result of political conflict. In every one of these cases, the people who pay the price are the ones who never had a seat at the negotiating table.
The Friendly Takeover Is Just a Siege by Another Name
Donald Trump has spoken of a "friendly takeover" of Cuba's leadership. Let's call that what it is: regime change via starvation.
The trajectory here is clear. As the grid continues to fail and the poverty rate climbs, we will see a massive surge in migration as daily life becomes unsustainable. The US will then use the resulting chaos—the very chaos it manufactured—as the justification for "intervention" on national security grounds.
The US is betting that the Cuban people will grow so desperate that they'll welcome a "takeover" just to get the water pumps running again. It is a cruel, clinical application of pressure that treats nine million people as collateral damage.
The US is not fighting a "national security threat" in Havana; it is creating a humanitarian catastrophe to facilitate a land grab. You don't cure a patient by cutting off their oxygen and then claiming they're dying because of their genetics. The blockade is the weapon, the blackout is the wound, and the "friendly takeover" is the theft.