Cubans face darkest hour as US blockade strangles island
“The resilience…” The lights went out before the Irish rapper Mo Chara could finish his sentence.
Kneecap was holding a press conference on Saturday in Havana’s Vedado neighbourhood as part of the Nuestra America Convoy, an international aid mission that had brought the Irish group to Cuba's capital.
Minutes earlier, they had played a three-song set to close the Festival de Primavera Pa’Cuba, while outside people ate, children bounced on trampolines and families played badminton.
Then, inside, darkness. The room fell silent. For a moment, no one spoke. Then a voice rang out from the front: “Cuba si, bloqueo no! (Cuba yes, blockade no).” It caught on quickly, filling the room.
Kneecap had led the crowd outside in chants of “Free Palestine”, “Viva Cuba”, and “Fuck Trump”. Now, in the dark, the politics of the moment were all too clear.
It was Cuba's third nationwide blackout of the month. Across Havana, the grid had collapsed.
The US and Israel went to war on Iran at the end of February. At the same time, US President Donald Trump has tightened the oil blockade on Cuba, part of a wider sanctions regime that has constrained fuel, finance, and imports of any and all goods.
Cubans can feel the noose tightening. The US has aided and abetted the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing annexation of the West Bank. It has taken out Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. It is waging war on Iran.
Last week, Trump said he would “have the honour of taking Cuba”. “Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it… They’re a very weakened nation right now.”
Cubans, who live on an island that since its revolution has been targeted by the US, are being throttled. They know they might be next.
Life without power
When the grid goes, everything goes with it: transport, refrigeration, communications. Water pumps fail. Food spoils. The phone network drops out.
By nightfall on Saturday, Havana was almost entirely dark. Only a handful of hotels remained lit, powered by generators and supplied through channels still permitted under US rules, which allow fuel imports for private entities but restrict supply to the state system that powers public services.
When the lights go out, ordinary Cubans sit in darkness, while the last enclaves of tourism remain illuminated.
The blackout came as the Nuestra America Convoy arrived from across the world with more than 35 tonnes of medicine, food, solar equipment and other essential supplies.
There were speeches, embraces, formal welcomes. But the blackout cut through them, collapsing the distance between diplomacy and daily life.
Across Havana, people adjusted. The foreign ministry press officer, who was helping the press cover the convoy’s activities, abruptly gathered her things and rushed off to collect her daughter before the streets went dark.
When electricity returns, however briefly, everything must be done at once. Cubans cook immediately in order to save food before it spoils. Phones are charged. Life is compressed into uncertain bursts of power.
Transport falters as fuel costs soar. Workers walk or miss shifts. Public systems are stretched to breaking point. One Cuban office worker told Middle East Eye their department was operating at “about 40 percent”, with the internet too unreliable to work effectively from home.
Cuba's medical emergency
In hospitals, the strain is constant. Doctors describe a system running on contingency: generators rationed, refrigeration monitored, procedures delayed. Emergency care continues, but only just.
Between 2014 and 2016, the US under President Barack Obama opened up to Cuba, removing it from the state sponsor of terrorism list and easing some restrictions.
That period is now distant history. In January, Trump signed an executive order declaring Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US.
'War and hegemony are trying to crush peace and multilateralism'
- Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel
Following Maduro’s abduction, the US cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba and has imposed additional tariffs on imports from countries like Mexico and Algeria that directly or indirectly supply oil to the Caribbean island.
Since the end of the Obama-era opening and the escalation of US measures under Trump, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has more than doubled - a stark measure of the stress placed on a healthcare system long held up as a national achievement.
At Havana’s Covadonga hospital, the impact of the blockade was clear, and the difference the Nuestra America Convoy’s supplies made immediate.
Occupying a set of classical mansions originally built for Havana’s former creole elite, the hospital was officially renamed after Salvador Allende, days after the CIA-backed coup that killed the Chilean president in 1973. Inside, a photograph shows Fidel Castro embracing Allende.
On Saturday, suitcases that had come from Puerto Rico – itself still under US rule – were hauled into the hospital. They contained antibiotics, treatments for chronic diseases, ointments, pain relief and vitamins, all items now difficult to secure through regular supply.
Dr Milene Vazquez, a neurologist and the hospital’s director, stood at the top of the steps in her white coat, watching as the cases were opened.
Her voice broke as she spoke. “Long live Puerto Rico… Long live Cuba. Long live all the peoples of the world.”
This is a hospital whose staff have served on state-run Cuban medical brigades in more than 40 countries. Vazquez herself worked in Pakistan. Here, international solidarity is a habitual practice.
Now, it was being returned. The same Puerto Rican delegation delivered aid to a centre for people with special needs. A clown show was underway and the assembled audience sat in rows, laughing.
“All of this, it’s about love,” one of the centre’s workers said, quietly.
'The future of the whole world'
For the Cuban government, the convoy is both a relief and a signal.
“It’s difficult to express with words what we Cubans feel with this expression of solidarity,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel told delegates from the Nuestra America Convoy.
“We are not just talking about the present and the future of Cuba, but the present and future of the whole world,” he said.
Diaz-Canel framed the crisis as geopolitical, linking Cuba’s situation to conflicts across the Middle East, including the war on Iran and the situation in Palestine.
“War and hegemony are trying to crush peace and multilateralism,” he said. “You are here to accompany us in the harshest of times and to demand of the most powerful force to let our people breathe.”
Cuba, he argued, had endured more than six decades of economic pressure without abandoning its core social programmes. “What has failed is the blockade.”
Perhaps the most powerful Cuban American right now is US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a lifelong enemy of the Cuban government who said last week the island "has to get new people in charge".
But among those listening to Diaz-Canel was Danny Valdes, co-founder of Cuban Americans for Cuba, a group seeking to challenge the idea that Cuban Americans speak with one voice.
“I’m Cuban American, and like many in our community, I want engagement between our countries, not siege,” Valdes said.
“The policies coming out of Washington today punish ordinary Cuban families while claiming to act in our name. That is why we are here: to show that solidarity across the Florida Straits is stronger than the politics of blockade.”
The scale of Cuba’s energy shortage – the scale of its crisis - cannot be addressed by humanitarian deliveries alone. Organisers of the Nuestra America Convoy know this, though the aid delivered has provided some much-needed relief.
“We are here to show the Cuban people are not alone,” said one of the convoy’s organisers, David Adler.
By early evening on Saturday, Havana was already dark.
At the music festival, the power never returned. Phone signals dropped out soon after. The place emptied.
Mo Chara had tried to hail Cuba’s resilience before being cut off.
In Havana now, resilience is not a slogan. It is a way of building life in the face of strangulation, of organising around outages that arrive without warning, around systems that fail and restart.
In Cuba, resilience is measured in what keeps going when everything else stops. It is in hospitals, in kitchens and in the flicker of phone torches in a room without power.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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