The Lights Go Out in Cuba

As the sun sank below the waves of the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, October 17, no lights flickered on in the concrete houses that line Cuban shores. More than half of the island plunged into the shadow of primitive night. Earlier that evening, Cuba’s exhausted electric grid suffered a major failure, its worst in years, leaving the majority of the country without power. Blackouts and power outages are not uncommon in Cuba; the government usually manages to patch things up somehow and get power distributed, although it is strictly rationed and often comes irregularly.

That was not to be the case this time. On Friday morning, the largest electrical plant in the country ground to a halt, and the Cuban power grid collapsed entirely. Cuba had left the modern era—going the wrong direction. Without any way to use the electric hot plates ubiquitous in Cuba, families huddled around wood fires in the streets to cook their meals. Water became scarce as well, with the electric pumps that pressurize the water supply out of commission. Frozen and refrigerated food rotted in the Caribbean heat.

Despite the best efforts of the workers for the Cuban Electric Union, the state power utility, who labored to repair the breakdown, the system collapsed repeatedly over the weekend, resulting in rolling blackouts in Havana and little to no power outside the capital region. The situation was made even more challenging for Cubans by the arrival of Hurricane Oscar, which made landfall on Sunday and flooded some areas of the island. President Miguel Díaz-Canel assured Cubans that the government “will have no rest” until power has been restored to the country, but at the time of writing some 30 percent of Cubans remained without electricity.

In a cruel irony, the dual disaster of a national blackout and an encroaching hurricane struck the country on Cuba’s National Day of Culture, one of the holidays of Cuban independence. In a post on ????, Díaz-Canel announced that “due to the complex power and hurricane situation, we cannot celebrate the National Day of Cuban Culture in memoriam of 156 years since we set out to win our independence. But we have the Patria, the Revolution, and Socialism, which is to say, the guarantee of protection for all.” (Not, however, a guarantee of electricity.)

The collapse of the Cuban power grid is a cutting metaphor for the general state of affairs that the country finds itself in. The electrical system depends on decrepit oil-burning plants sustained by significant imports of foreign fuel. The plants, built to supply electricity sufficient for the island’s power needs in the ’80s and ’90s, are now barely capable of supplying enough power to the population even when strictly rationed. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist government of Cuba lost its major patron, and the state has had to stretch its meager capacity and budget as thin as possible in order to maintain basic social functions. As a result, power generation in Cuba has grown at a crawl. The state utility scrapes as much power from the existing infrastructure as possible, but there’s no budget to do serious maintenance, to build new plants, or to renovate the electrical grid.

The crisis is made worse by the lack of available fuel. Cuba has traditionally depended on importing tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day from Mexico and Venezuela, but Venezuela—embroiled in domestic turmoil and economic crisis—has little oil to spare, and Mexico has reduced its exports to Cuba to a mere 20,000 a day. Cuba does produce some oil domestically, but its homegrown product is of poor quality, and burning it degrades the already desperate conditions of the nation’s electrical plants. The state doesn’t have the money to buy additional fuel on the open market.

The Cuban government has attempted a “pivot to Asia” strategy of its own, seeking to replace its former ally (and principal source of income), communist Russia, with communist China, but the Chinese government has shown little ideological interest in Cuban socialism and even less interest in providing state subsidies. Chinese companies, often so eager to pour money into emerging markets, view Cuba as a black hole that has no potential to provide returns on investment. A few days before the blackout, the Financial Times reported that “Chinese officials have been perplexed and frustrated at the Cuban leadership’s unwillingness to decisively implement a market-oriented reform program despite the glaring dysfunction of the status quo.”

All told, the state has no money to properly repair the electrical system, no money to replace the damaged and outdated portions of the electrical system, and no way to entice any foreign company or government to finance such a project. Cubans wouldn’t be able to pay power rates high enough for companies to make back their initial investment, which would require billions of dollars and years of construction. The country couldn’t sell off its electrical utility for any price, even if it wanted to.

The state also has no plans to do anything to remedy the situation. Committed to the ideological principles of Cuban socialism, the government is willing to literally run the country into the ground until the lights go out.

The power grid will be slowly patched up over the course of this week. Rationed power will come online, and Cubans will be able to cook and access running water—for a while. But it’s an unsustainable situation. The outdated, improperly maintained power plants will not run forever. The system will collapse again, and eventually, it will collapse permanently.

Some apologists will argue that the whole problem is the fault of the United States and our embargo on trade with Cuba. That is both obfuscatory and false. Increased American trade might allow Cuba to purchase parts a little more easily and have access to a few more tourist dollars with which the government could prop up the ailing economy, but it won’t change the fundamentals of the situation. Cuba has access to hundreds of other trade partners—it just doesn’t have an economy that produces anything worth trading. Cuban socialist central planning has managed to produce decent medical training and an excellent spy agency, but mostly it has produced grinding poverty and government bankruptcy. Soon, it will produce another failed Caribbean state.

The lights are not coming back on in Cuba.

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