Cuba's national electric grid collapses, leaving millions without power

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cubas-national-electric-grid-collapses-says-grid-operator-2026-03-16/

by geox • 4 months ago

88 51 4 months ago

bitwize• 4 months ago

"Communism can never work," says leader of country that routinely sabotages or outright overthrows communist governments.

rayiner7• 4 months ago

How is the U.S. "sabotaging" Cuba? The U.S. simply prevents capitalistic American companies from doing business with Cuba.

Regardless, the fact that communism doesn't work was proven decades ago by China's shift to authoritarian state-managed capitalism. Singapore, South Korea, and, ironically, Vietnam are other examples that show that model works really well at pulling third-world countries out of poverty.

craftkiller2• 4 months ago

How is the U.S. "sabotaging" Cuba? The U.S. simply prevents capitalistic American companies from doing business with Cuba.

It is not just American companies. It is a blockade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Cuban_crisis

skeledrew3• 4 months ago

How is the U.S. "sabotaging" Cuba?

Is this for real? There has been a blockade on Cuba for decades. Any country that wants to do business with them is threatened, implicitly or explicitly. Look at how Venezuela, their primary supplier of oil, was recently invaded and taken over, and the shipments stopped.

TheAlchemist• 4 months ago

Is this a serious question ?

Read this first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...

Recently, the U.S. decided that Cuba can no longer import any oil, and they are enforcing that. Is this a surprise that the grid collapses in those circumstances ?

Communism is bad (I'm from Eastern Europe...), but this collapse has nothing to do with communism. It has everything to do, with the U.S. deciding unilaterally that Cuba needs to fall.

sQL_inject2• 4 months ago

"The main responsibility of every Soviet citizen was to facilitate the arrival of Communism, where people would contribute to society according to their abilities, and receive from society according to their needs -- has there ever been a nobler sounding goal? And yet historians cannot agree on an estimate of many millions of people were starved to death, tortured to death, or worked to death, all in the name of that goal."

PickledHotdog• 4 months ago

And yet millions of people starve, are tortured and are worked to death in the name of Capitalism. How many die or are made destitute due to lack of affordable healthcare in the US alone?

Not to mention the trillions of dollars (and lives) given up in the pursuit of halting what we're told is a fragile, prone-to-collapse form of government for a hundred years now.

Strange that.

lefrenchy• 4 months ago

Am I crazy for thinking this is possibly a US cyber attack on the infrastructure to justify Trump's coming actions?

3eb7988a1663• 4 months ago

Uhh yes? The country has been blockaded from receiving fuel. While there could be a more clever attack, the overt one is enough to do all of the damage.

SR2Z3• 4 months ago

The country has categorically not been blockaded. A blockade is an act of war where a country prevents all trade regardless of origin.

Cuba has been embargoed which prevents US owned businesses, as well as any businesses which operate in the US, from trading with it. An embargo is not an act of war, it's a way for market economies to apply economic pressure using their soft power. It's not enforced by the military away from the territory of the country placing the embargo and is instead enforced domestically using the police.

Large oil-producing countries that traded with Cuba include Venezuela, Russia (the USSR before 1990), China, and Iran. Market democracies are all pretty OK with the embargo, because trade with a country that doesn't recognize property rights is inherently fraught.

DivingForGold• 4 months ago

Cubans have horses and depend on then a lot. Why not have horses or oxen running around in a circle or the method in this video for powering a generator or alternator ?

https://youtu.be/dpq3tXz0QoI?t=217

schumpeter2• 4 months ago

Having family in Cuba, I guess this could work, but it doesn’t scale, because someone will inevitably steal your horses for dinner, when you aren’t looking.

dandelany• 4 months ago

Maybe in a pinch, doesn't seem very sustainable. A single decent 400 watt solar panel produces about the same continuous power as a horse, and doesn't consume 20 lbs of hay per day, or pee on your generator.

dzonga2• 4 months ago

Cuba should've learned from China.

Communism with Cuban characteristics.

Then got energy independent-- by importing a lot of solar panels, wind turbines from China.

then they wouldn't be suffering an energy embargo from the US.

for the few cases they need hydrocarbons import from Russia.

xp843• 4 months ago

China first got a lot of money by exporting billions (trillions?) of dollars of stuff to the whole world with their huge labor force (and presumably a lot of raw materials either homemade or imported). Cuba doesn’t have that ability.

An alternative plan: Cuba could also, at any point, have given up on Communism and rejoin the rest of the world. Even China sold out a lot of its communist ideals if we’re being honest, which helped the West feel pretty okay doing business with them.

poulpy123• 4 months ago

And Cuba is a small island next to the US, not a massive juggernaut on the other side of the world

skeledrew3• 4 months ago

Cuba could also, at any point, have given up on Communism

Why should they? If it wasn't for the decades of sabotage it would've been working for them reasonably. Should they succumb to the bullying from another country that hates their ideals?

greenavocado• 4 months ago

Cuba is resisting a take over from American oligarchs and a repressive police state engineered to maximize wealth transfer to said oligarchs after they take power. Read the introduction to this guy for a taste of what's to come. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

thiagoharry2• 4 months ago

You are forgetting the criminal economic and trade embargo against Cuba. With what money would they buy these Chinese solar panels? How exactly would they obtain the dollars? What economic activity do you propose for them to industrialize and become internationally competitive, given that they are an island with very few natural resources and, thanks to the embargo, have to pay much more for any resource compared to any other country?

dzonga2• 4 months ago

I'm not - clearly going against a superpower hell bent on destroying you and making you a colony hasn't exactly worked for them. I'm just pointing reality as it is - you can't force the US to change - it will remain imperialist.

economic activity - export labor to China, Africa they've already been doing that already.

they still receive money from other countries not just the US.

I have lived under a US sanctioned country - blaming the US doesn't help - most of the fault lies in administration of said country - the effects of sanctions is less than say the effect of an incompetent administration

g8oz• 4 months ago

The lawless bully nation known as the United States is strangling Cuba. They manufactured this crisis by threatening sanctions on anyone who sends oil to the country. An act of outrageous imperial aggression.

burnt-resistor• 4 months ago

Just like overthrowing Iran's, Mosaddegh because Cuba's, Maduro, et. al. litany of past and current regimes globally aren't slavishly servile, Cuba's, Iran's, Venezula's, and many other peoples suffer because an imperial superpower is denied extraction of money, resources, and compliance from a government, its land, and its people.

Cuba Plunged Into a Nationwide Blackout Trump demands taking it or overthrowing regime; testimonials from a local and a visitor (video, English) begins at 35:56

https://democracynow.cachefly.net/democracynow/360/dn2026-03... (SD, mp4)

https://ewheel.democracynow.org/dn2026-0317.mp4.torrent (HD, torrent of mp4) *

https://archive.org/details/dn2026-0317_vid *

* Available several hours from time of writing

Protesters Reportedly Attack Communist Party Office in Cuba as Energy Crisis Deepens (yesterday)

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/16/headlines/protesters_...

Cuba's national electric grid collapses, leaving millions without power

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