Darkness Before the Light in Cuba | The American Spectator

Monday, something inevitable happened.

Officials in Cuba reported an island-wide blackout Monday in the country of some 11 million people as its energy and economic crises deepen and its power grid continues to crumble.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines on X noted a “complete disconnection” of the country’s electrical system and said it was investigating, noting there were no failures in the units that were operating when the grid collapsed.

It was the third major blackout in Cuba over the past four months.

Tomás David Velázquez Felipe, a 61-year-old resident of Havana, said the relentless outages make him think that Cubans who can should just pack up and leave the island. “What little we have to eat spoils,” he said. “Our people are too old to keep suffering.”

Cuba’s aging grid has drastically eroded in recent years, leading to an increase in daily outages and island-wide blackouts. But the government also has blamed its woes on a U.S. energy blockade after President Donald Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba. The Trump administration is demanding that Cuba release political prisoners and move toward political and economic liberalization in return for a lifting of sanctions.

William LeoGrande, a professor at American University who has tracked Cuba for years, said the country’s energy grid hasn’t been maintained properly and its infrastructure is “way past its normal useful life.”

“The technicians working on the grid are magicians to keep it running at all given the shape that it’s in,” LeoGrande said.

The Cuban regime is essentially admitting it can’t keep the lights on. This happened in the wake of a few other significant developments on “that imprisoned island,” as President John F. Kennedy accurately described Cuba all the way back in 1962.

First, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the puppet president fronting for Cuba’s geriatric dictator-behind-the-scenes Raul Castro, took to national TV to admit that his government was in negotiations with the Trump administration “focused on finding solutions to bilateral differences we have between the two nations through dialogue.”

“These are processes that are done with great discretion, they are long processes,“ he said. “You have to first establish contact … there needs to be willingness for dialogue and all of that takes time. And after that, agendas are built, you enter negotiations and conversations, and you reach an agreement. These are things we are still far from.”

That sounds cryptic enough, to be sure, and it can be interpreted in lots of different ways.

For example, the citizens of the unfortunately-named city of Morón, located east of Havana, ramped up what had been a week of protests by expressing a fairly emphatic judgment of Diaz-Canel’s government…

OVERNIGHT: Raw Footage Shows Cuban Coup D’état
Communist offices burning, country’s rocked by fierce political protests

Government no longer has control over the streets & crowds declare that they have nothing to lose

Uprisings in the major cities of Ciego de Ávila & Morón pic.twitter.com/s2cmethVum

— Sergeant News Network (@sgtnewsnetwork) March 15, 2026

…and that was just the start of the increasingly ramped-up trouble in Cuba.

The Castroite regime is almost gone. It certainly can’t survive its inability to supply power to its people.

And it can’t blame Trump or his “oil blockade.” Which is a canard to begin with.

The executive order the president issued in January didn’t blockade Cuba. It threatened tariffs against countries giving Cuba free oil or selling oil to Cuba. That isn’t a blockade; that’s an adjustment to U.S. trade policy.

What Trump really did was to interdict Venezuela’s providing free oil to Cuba, and he did that not so much out of a blockade of Cuba but out of an enforcement of U.S. sanctions against Venezuelan oil exports. And then a raid on Caracas took down Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, occasioning a Venezuelan government much more pliable to American interests, and that was the end of free Venezuelan oil for Cuba. (RELATED: The Man Behind the Dictator)

Next was a bit of diplomacy with Mexican narco-president Claudia Sheinbaum, whose national oil company, Pemex, had been giving the Cubans set-aside oil.

The official line was that Trump was starving the Cubans of fuel. That’s a facile excuse being made for the Castro regime. There are lots of countries out there that could be selling the Cubans oil, U.S. tariffs be damned. None have, for two months running. Why is that?

The answer is simple — because Cuba is run by a deadbeat regime which has nothing with which to pay for the oil.

The Gulf of Mexico is teeming with fish, and yet Cuba has no fish to sell.

Cuba has always had a surplus of sugar, and yet there is no sugar to sell.

Cuba has no cigars to sell. It has no rum to sell.

It has nothing to sell. Save for military and intelligence operatives that it was giving to Venezuela in exchange for free oil, in a deal that Trump has exploded. What the 15,000 Cubans who were propping up Maduro are going to do now is a real question — and a concern, too.

None of this is new. This should have come to a head years ago.

Specifically, it should have come to a head in the summer of 2021, when this song came out…

If you don’t follow Cuba, you probably don’t know or remember Patria y Vida, which was a collaboration of Cuban artists in Miami and Havana — the two musicians in Cuba, Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, were arrested and sentenced to nine and five years in jail, respectively, for putting it out — and which won a couple of Grammy Awards in 2021. It’s a very powerful song with some amazingly poetic lyrics, and it flips on its head Fidel Castro’s old communist slogan Patria o Muerte — Fatherland or Death. (RELATED: A Hard Week for the Hard Left)

Patria y Vida means Fatherland and Life.

That song was the anthem of widespread protests all over Cuba in 2021, which were violently put down by the regime. The Biden administration said and did nothing when it should have stood up for the protesters, if not actively taken steps to bring down the regime. And because of that inaction, the Cuban people have suffered needless deprivation and oppression for five grueling years until the whole thing has finally collapsed. (RELATED: Our Cubacrat President and His Revolutionary Handlers)

As Margaret Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. Cuba stands as a perfect example of this. They’ve consumed all of the wealth of their own nation and can no longer consume the wealth of neighboring Latin American countries. They’ve tried to prop themselves up on tourism from stupid leftists in Canada and Europe, but at the end of the day, the Europeans and “Syrupeans” tend to prefer beaches not governed by the communists they idolize, and so their wealth is off limits.

The Castros are all billionaires, of course, which tells the fundamental tale of socialism.

Namely, that if you consolidate all the paths to success which exist in a free society — competence, celebrity, personality, persuasion, artistic talent, commercial talent, knowledge, innovation and influence, to name a few — into political power and patronage, which is what socialism does, you’re going to get a whole society built on political power and patronage and a shriveling of everything else.

It’s hardly a surprise that Josef Stalin, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Pol Pot, and the other monsters who ended up as communist dictators rose to the top. They were the most ruthless sons of bitches their societies could produce. It didn’t matter that they didn’t look good, that their ideas were garbage, or that none of them could run a lemonade stand. What mattered was that they were more efficient killers than their rivals were.

Except ultimately, killing your rivals leads to a dead end. And Cuba’s end is very dead.

It’s dark every night all over Cuba now, save for the light from the fire at Communist Party headquarters. But that darkness won’t last.

The next round of negotiations between Diaz-Canel and his handlers on one side and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the other are probably going to be about getting just enough jet fuel to Havana that the Castro clan can board a jet for Madrid.

That regime is cooked. We’re down to days, not weeks, before it all comes down. This much is obvious. You can’t run a country so far into the ground that even those with influence can’t keep the lights on or the ceiling fan moving. And nobody believes Cuba’s dire straits are Trump’s fault. Especially not the Cubans, who are covering the crumbling walls of its buildings with pro-Trump graffiti.

Patria y Vida is replacing Patria o Muerte.

And the light is coming to replace the darkness in Cuba.

Before we go, I have one more thing to offer. It’s from back in 2021, when the revolt that should have taken down the regime began. Rubio made a speech on the Senate floor, which will turn out to be quite historic in retrospect, and it still describes the situation in Cuba perfectly…

…though not for very much longer.

We will see a Cuba Libre, too long delayed.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: How’s the Iran War Actually Going?

The Abysmal Quality of the GOP Senate Caucus Is the Real Issue, and the SAVE Act Mess Has Made That Clear

The Iranians Didn’t Select a Dead Guy as Supreme Leader, Did They?