Cuba’s electrical grid has collapsed at least four times since midday Friday, repeatedly plunging around 10 million people into darkness, with the most recent blackout coming yesterday. The grid’s failures follow weeks of planned rolling blackouts and come as Tropical Storm Oscar made landfall in eastern Cuba yesterday evening. (Reuters)
Evidently, Cuba was already struggling to restore its power grid before Oscar hit the country yesterday. But the storm will make it much more difficult to restore power, even as the lack of a functioning power grid will worsen the humanitarian impact of flooding and heavy winds in eastern Cuba.
Authorities in the country now say they hope to restore electricity by the end of Tuesday by relying on smaller grids to power each region until the national grid can be stabilized. Still, the prolonged blackout is the result of broader challenges facing Cuba, and those aren’t going away once Oscar passes and power is restored.
The most glaring of those challenges is Cuba’s failed state-managed economic model, which has struggled for decades but has been in full-blown crisis in recent years due to a series of external exacerbating factors:
Since the late 2010s, the political and economic crisis in Venezuela interrupted the flow of affordable oil to Cuba, which for the preceding 15 years had allowed the country to climb back from the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Trump administration reversed virtually all the U.S. policy reforms associated with the Obama administration’s normalization of relations with Havana, reimposing travel bans on U.S. citizens and limits on remittances to the island.
The COVID-19 pandemic cratered Cuba’s tourism industry, which represented the country’s last remaining source of hard currency.
There was some expectation that when U.S. President Joe Biden took office in 2021, his administration would move quickly to alleviate the Trump administration’s Cuba policies. But while Biden did reverse the most draconian restrictions, he moved slowly to remove others while leaving many in place. That decision speaks to Biden’s electoral calculations—Cuban American voters in Florida are an important constituency in U.S. presidential politics—but also the conundrum Washington has historically faced in dealing with Havana: how to alleviate the humanitarian impact of U.S. sanctions without benefiting a regime responsible for many human rights violations.
The result of all of these factors is the severe economic crisis in which Cuba now finds itself, and which the regime has shown little capacity to address. After a brief period of piecemeal liberalization to limited sectors of the economy in the late 2010s, the old guard of Cuba’s Communist Party has been on the ascendant, blocking any further reforms. Those that were implemented, including some austerity measures earlier this year, have failed to invigorate the economy.