By Ed Augustin

To say that Cuba has had a trying week would be an understatement. After a grid failure last Friday caused four days of nationwide blackouts and a Category One hurricane smashed into the eastern province of Guantanamo on Monday, killing seven, the lights are back on most of the time and things have steadied on the island.

Nilza Valdés Núñez, sixty-one, from Guanabacoa, East Havana, feels a bit of a relief. I spoke to her on Monday, the day after her eighty-one-year-old mother cooked all the defrosting meat in their freezer that her brother in Florida had bought for them.

“The lack of electricity, of gas, and all the other problems we have here,” said, pausing with tears in her eyes but fury in her voice, “make you feel so bad.”

Nilza Valdés Núñez’s empty freezer. (Ed Augustin / Jacobin)
At a time when over a million Cuban homes are already going without running water, the power cuts compounded the problem by disabling pumps. People carried water to their houses in buckets from nearby cisterns and wells.

Before the blackouts, the street price of a bag of ten bread rolls in her neighborhood was about 50 cents (150 pesos). In their aftermath, it shot up to nearly a dollar (280 pesos).

Once all but vanquished, hunger has returned in Cuba in recent years, as state guaranteed food rations have been cut. With scarce food spoiled and prices rising this last week, some who rely on state salaries or pensions and don’t have relatives to help them out from abroad are now feeling the pinch as much as people were in the Special Period following the Soviet Union’s collapse.

At the same time, the country’s resilience is striking. Massive outages like this would terrify people in other countries, but many I met took them calmly and even with nonchalance.

Playing on her phone in old Havana, next to a crumbling three-story building with a tree growing out of its roof, Anyeli Imbert told me, “It’s not scary for us when the lights go out because we’re used to it. It’s not a big deal.”

Anyeli Imbert in Havana. (Ed Augustin / Jacobin)
Other people’s resilience came out in humor. “These things happen,” said Yosvani Valdés, on the same block. “The lights go out in Japan when there are typhoons. The lights went out in Houston a few weeks ago when there was a cyclone there. People blow these things out of proportion, but we Cubans face adversity with laughter, and we always find a way through.”

A Crisis of Legitimacy
The ruling Communist Party of Cuba, meanwhile, faces its biggest political crisis ever. Four failed attempts to get the national grid back online have underscored a growing sense that the government is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the multiple crises, many of which are rooted in sweeping US sanctions. Economically, it’s bankrupt. Ideologically, it has not fully enacted its own reform program, formally agreed upon way back at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party, in 2011.

In many senses, the expanded market economy is keeping the show on the road: more food is now imported by the private sector than by the withering state. But the increased inequality it has brought has also undermined a sense that everyone is facing the crisis together — a major difference between the Special Period thirty years ago and today. People who go without breakfast now see overweight officials on television exhorting them to further tighten their belts. Social justice has been eroded, and with it much of the government’s legitimacy.

Speaking about the outages In Washington, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that the United States is “concerned about the potential humanitarian impacts on the Cuban people.” Laughing as if the claim were far-fetched, she added, “I just want to make clear that the US is not to blame for the blackouts on the island.”

In fact, US sanctions are a major driver of the island’s energy crisis. It takes impressive audacity to deny it.

Washington specifically targets tankers that deliver the fuel the island needs to keep the lights on. By freezing assets of ships delivering oil, the Treasury Department leaves Cuba with fewer suppliers, driving up the island’s energy costs.

US sanctions are a major driver of the island’s energy crisis. It takes impressive audacity to deny it.
More broadly, over the last decade sanctions on Cuba have been ramped up to unprecedented levels. The Joe Biden administration has left in place the most potent sanctions enacted by the Donald Trump administration, including the powerful Helms-Burton Title III, which chills investment in the island, and the false accusation that Cuba sponsors terrorism, which cuts it out of much of the world banking system. Economists calculate that these new sanctions cost the state billions of dollars a year — leaving less money to import petroleum, repair obsolete infrastructure, and import solar panels.

“We are doing everything we can to make it as damn hard as possible for Cuba to keep the lights on,” said Fulton Armstrong, who previously served as the top US intelligence officer for Latin America who is now a senior fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies.

He added that “people at the State Department have been alarmed by the efficiency of their threats” to the private sector. The thoroughness of sanctions enforcement by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the Department of the Treasury has created a culture of “overcompliance” in the private sector, he said, where companies steer clear of trading with Cuba because ambiguous regulations and the severity of the penalties make it not worth their while. “In the olden days, OFAC had twenty or twenty-five people devoted to Cuba,” he said. “But in the digital age, you have these large bureaucracies to hunt down people who could be violating our embargo and to harass the private sector in the US, Europe, and Latin America.”

During the Biden administration, there’s been an odd disconnect between the reality of sanctions and the way they are spoken about. Whereas the Trump administration bragged about how its “maximum pressure” sanctions would cripple the island, the Biden administration has kept the core of the sanctions regime in place but flat-out denies that it has anything to do with Cuba’s crises.

Window-dressing measures help this effort. Joy Gordon, an expert on sanctions at Loyola University Chicago, dubbed this the “theatrics of humanitarian concern” in an article last year. In what she describes as a “gushingly self-congratulatory” press release, OFAC announced “general licenses” for humanitarian goods in countries the United States sanctions. “The provision of humanitarian support to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable populations is central to our American values,” OFAC said. But the severity of the overall sanctions regime means that the general licenses do not really allow for more humanitarian goods to get in.

For most of the island’s ten million people, the moment is perilous.
In the wake of the power outages and the latest hurricane, there’s been a flurry of organizing by people in the United States who demand a different relationship with Cuba. Hundreds of activists attended an online emergency meeting this week organized by Massachusetts Peace Action. Cuba experts with decades of experience signed an open letter to President Biden calling on him to ease sanctions and to provide American aid to the Cuban people during his final weeks in office.

But the island’s energy crisis isn’t going away anytime soon. Many of the Soviet-era power stations are nearing half a century old. The country can barely afford spare parts and is unable to import enough petroleum to keep the lights on. Getting the grid back online and going back to “normal” means millions of people, especially those outside Havana, enduring long power outages every day.

And the events of this week have kicked off a vicious cycle that will be hard to break. In the wake of the national outages, Canada, from which more tourists visit Cuba each year than anywhere else, updated its travel warning for the island. Reduced tourism revenue would make it even harder for the government to dig itself out of the energy crisis.

Ultimately, analysts say that modernizing Cuba’s power grid will require external assistance. There’s not much on the horizon. US pressure prevents Cuba going to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or Inter-American Development Bank for support. Deliveries of Venezuelan oil, sent to Cuba in exchange for doctors, nurses, and teachers working in Venezuela ever since 2000, have dropped markedly in recent years. Mexico has offered technical assistance to keep the grid running. But Russia and China, bigger players who have surely been consulted this week, have not shown signs of decisively stepping in.

For most of the island’s ten million people, the moment is perilous.

Ed Augustin is a British journalist based in Cuba.

Jacobin Magazine