Everyone knew this was coming. Cuba has been struggling to keep the lights on for at least a year before their oil supply from Venezuela was suddenly cut off. That meant it was only a matter of weeks before the country ran out of fuel to keep the lights on. It’s looking at the moment like today might be that day.
A failure at Cuba’s main thermoelectric plant has caused a massive blackout affecting two-thirds of the island, the Cuban government confirmed Wednesday. The partial collapse of the island’s National Electric System (SEN) — the second in a month — has left nearly 7 million of the island’s almost 10 million inhabitants without power. The outage is also affecting the capital, Havana.
The government has not yet specified the reasons for the blackout, which is affecting 10 of the country’s 15 provinces, from Camagüey in the east to Pinar del Río in the west. According to state television, an “unforeseen shutdown” of the Antonio Guiteras power plant, the island’s largest generator, caused yet another power outage.
This Wednesday’s outage is the fifth partial blackout — different from a nationwide collapse of the entire electrical system — in less than six months, and the largest so far this year.
So it’s not clear yet whether this is the worst case scenario in which the entire island loses power and there’s no hope it will return. However, this also isn’t just the normal daily rationing of power, where it might be off for 20 hours and then come on in the middle of the night for a few hours. This appears to be some kind of power system failure that could require a reboot, one that could take a couple days.
SEN shutdowns, on the other hand, force authorities to carry out a kind of system reboot that, in the worst cases, can take days to fully restore. Before Wednesday’s collapse was confirmed, the state‑owned Unión Eléctrica (UNE) had warned that up to 63% of the country would be left without power at peak demand — late in the afternoon.
It seems like Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel might have seen this coming. Diaz-Canel was picked as the successor to Raul Castro and has made continuity with Cuba’s communist legacy his brand.
He made the phrase “We are continuity” his personal slogan.
Díaz-Canel is one of the regime’s most unpopular figures, earning a popular expletive as a nickname on the island. He climbed up the government ladder and was the last standing member of a group of young party stalwarts groomed to succeed Fidel Castro and later Raúl, and has survived several rounds of purges over the years.
Raúl Castro chose him to succeed him, first as the country’s president in 2018, and in 2021 as head of the Communist Party. Hopes that he could be Cuba’s Mikhail Gorbachev – the last Soviet leader, who ushered in reforms and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union – quickly dissipated.
Díaz-Canel has presided over the largest exodus in Cuba’s recent history — almost two million Cubans have left since 2020 — and the largest demonstrations since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. And while Raúl Castro never truly retired and is still Cuba’s ultimate authority, it was Díaz-Canel who became the face of the economic crisis and the botched government policies that have run the country into the ground.
“He lost the little legitimacy he had left during the July 11 protests” in 2021, said a Cuban American who has met him and asked not to be named to speak about the interactions. On July 11, during island-wide anti-government protests, Díaz-Canel went on live television to urge government supporters to confront the demonstrators “by all means necessary,” a statement that many understood as condoning violence against the protesters.
That’s who this guy is. He’s a dead-ender for communism. It certainly has seemed that way over the past couple weeks as he’s issued tough talk and declared a “state of war” in Cuba.
On Monday of this week it almost sounded as if he was on the verge of realizing it might be time for a change.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Monday that his government should “immediately” focus on implementing urgent transformations to the island’s economic and social model as oil reserves in the Caribbean country dwindle…
“We must focus, immediately, on implementing the urgent, most necessary transformations that must be made to the economic and social model,” he was quoted as saying by state-owned media.
Díaz-Canel said the push to transform Cuba’s economic and social model are tied to business and municipal autonomy and the resizing of the state apparatus, government and institutions, among other things, according to state-owned media.
In the current context, the talk about urgent transformations might sound like a signal of something new, but the Miami Herald says he’s been giving this same speech for months.
The measures he mentioned — among them giving more autonomy to state enterprises and local governments — had been previously announced as part of a government plan that Cuban economists already deemed as insufficient to significantly overhaul the island’s failing economy.
“He is repeating the same message, just at a higher frequency and with the volume dialed to 11, but is the same thing, with no plan and no implementation,” said Ricardo Herrero, the executive director of the Washington-based Cuba Study Group.
The NY Times quoted another Cuba expert basically saying the same thing.
“This is not a genuine reflection on much-needed and long overdue change,” said Ricardo Torres, a Cuban-born economist at American University. He described the Cuban president’s proposals on Monday as “change so that everything remains the same.”
In other words, Diaz-Canel doesn’t seem capable of doing anything besides doubling down on stupid. If Cuba is going to change it will have to do so without him. And that’s why the US isn’t bothering with him as Sec. of State Rubio continues to talk with other figures who might be more interested in turning the lights back on.
A source familiar with the discussions said U.S. officials view Díaz-Canel as “an obstacle” to reforms Washington would like to see in Cuba.
The assessment has been communicated during back-channel contacts between advisers to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and individuals connected to Cuba’s ruling establishment, including Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro…
The contacts with Rodríguez Castro reflect the belief among some U.S. officials that the Castro family remains the ultimate decision maker in Cuba. One official described the discussions as “discussions about the future,” adding that “the U.S. government’s position — is the regime has to go.”
So that’s where this is headed. Sooner or later people will have enough and, just like in Venezuela, someone new will step up and take over. Whoever that is will have a much different attitude about communism and the United States.
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