Cuba’s communist government is facing its toughest challenge since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as days of nationwide power failures cripple an island already suffering from severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine.
The national grid has collapsed four times in the past four days, leaving most of the country, including the capital Havana, without power. Residents were reduced to carrying buckets of water from cisterns or wells to their houses and queueing longer than usual for bread and other basic necessities.
Small anti-government protests broke out over the weekend around the island, and President Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on state television wearing military fatigues on Sunday night to warn Cubans not to take part in “vandalism”.
“We are not going to accept nor allow anyone to act as a vandal and much less to affect the tranquility of our people,” said the president, who is rarely seen in uniform.
Schools and all non-essential businesses were closed on Monday, as the authorities struggled to re-establish power. By afternoon, state-run media said about 89 per cent of residents in Havana had electricity and it was slowly returning to rural areas.
As Cuban authorities were struggling to reconnect the country’s decrepit power grid on Sunday, a category-one hurricane barrelled into the east of the island, dumping heavy rain and lashing the area with winds.
The energy crisis comes at a perilous time for Cuba, which is struggling to provide its population with vital necessities such as food, water and rubbish collection, and has been hit by lacklustre tourist demand and severe US sanctions.
“The Cuban government and Communist party are facing the worst crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union, both economically and politically,” said Bill LeoGrande, a Cuba specialist at American University in Washington. “The government is broke, it doesn’t have the money to import enough food or fuel.”
Cubans are accustomed to power cuts but the problem has become increasingly acute, with four-hour outages a regular feature of life in Havana, while in the countryside they often last for more than 12 hours a day.
In an address to the nation last week, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said the country could no longer afford to buy enough fuel on the international market to generate the power it needs.
Supplies from Cuba’s international allies do not make up for the shortfall. Venezuela has reduced oil shipments to Cuba considerably in recent years, and although Russia has increased deliveries of crude, they are not enough to power the island. China is installing solar panels on the island but this is a long-term project.
Meanwhile, the government has failed to maintain Soviet-era power stations and has not fully implemented promised market-oriented reforms that could help it transition to a more open economy.
The US embargo is also driving the fuel shortages. The Biden administration has left in place “maximum pressure” Trump-era sanctions, which economists say prevent billions of dollars a year from flowing into state coffers.
The reinforced US embargo has deprived the Cuban state of “the ability to do many things, including import spare parts and fuel for electricity production”, said Fulton Armstrong, a former US national intelligence officer for Latin America.
Analysts say that to secure a more sustainable power supply Cuba must replace its Soviet-era power plants, most of which are nearly half a century old.
“The solution is radical reform and outside investment,” said Ricardo Torres, a research fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.
