The Island That Is Emptying

Cuba's Energy Crisis, the Venezuela Connection, and the Price of Sixty-Six Years of Policy

Published May 24, 2026

On the night of March 21, 2026, Havana went dark. Not the rolling blackouts that Cubans had learned to navigate by candlelight and memory — a total blackout, the kind where the city disappears. Trash piled up in the streets because the trucks had no fuel to run. Hospital surgeries were limited because the generators could not sustain the equipment. Women gave birth in completely dark facilities. People burned wood to cook. It was, by the accounts of the Cubans living through it, worse than anything they had experienced since the collapse of the Soviet Union thirty-five years ago. In surveys conducted this year, 80% of Cubans said the current crisis is worse than the Special Period — the name Fidel Castro gave to the years of hunger and darkness that followed the Soviet collapse in 1991. For a generation that lived through that period, the comparison is not rhetorical. It is a precise calibration of suffering.

To understand how Cuba arrived at this moment, you have to understand what the Special Period actually was — and how it ended.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Cuba lost the patron that had been subsidizing its economy to the tune of $4 to $6 billion per year. Soviet oil imports to Cuba collapsed by almost 90 percent, from 13 million tons in 1989 to 1.8 million tons in 1992. Cuba's GDP fell by roughly 35 to 40 percent in four years. Caloric intake fell by an estimated 30 percent. Cubans were eating one meal a day. The government rationed everything — food, fuel, electricity — and called it a special period in a time of peace, borrowing language from wartime contingency plans because nothing else in peacetime had ever required this level of deprivation. It lasted the better part of a decade.

What ended it was Hugo Chávez. When the Venezuelan president rose to power in 1999, he offered Cuba something the Soviet Union had provided and no one else had replaced: heavily subsidized oil, delivered reliably, in exchange for Cuban doctors, military advisers, and security personnel deployed throughout Venezuela. At its peak, Venezuela was sending Cuba somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil per day. The lights came back on. The economy stabilized. Cuba had found a new patron.

On January 3, 2026, United States Delta Force units captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at the Fuerte Tiuna military installation in Caracas during an operation called Operation Absolute Resolve. Thirty-two Cuban military personnel from the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of Interior, embedded in Maduro's personal security detail, were killed in the operation. Cuba declared two days of national mourning. Within days, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on oil shipments to Cuba, beginning what Havana would call an oil blockade. Venezuela's oil — which had represented approximately 50% of Cuba's oil deficit, between 30,000 and 35,000 barrels per day of subsidized crude — stopped flowing. By May 13, 2026, Cuba's Minister of Energy and Mines announced that the island had depleted its diesel and fuel oil reserves entirely.

The speed of the collapse is a direct consequence of Cuba's structural dependence on a single external patron — a dependence the country has replicated twice in its modern history, first with the Soviet Union and then with Venezuela, and which has left it catastrophically vulnerable each time that patron disappeared. Cuba produces barely 40% of the fuel it needs to power its own economy. The electrical grid is built around oil-fired generation plants, most of them aging Soviet-era infrastructure that has not been replaced or substantially modernized in decades. Of 78 CT scanners in Cuban hospitals nationwide, 37 are broken and 9 impaired. Of 21 MRI units, 10 are broken and 7 impaired. Since February 2026, hospitals have been forced to ration energy-intensive diagnostics entirely, and physicians have been directed to rely on direct clinical observation — the medicine of a century ago — in their place. Voltage instability has accelerated equipment failure in ways that cannot be repaired under sanctions because the parts come from companies subject to the American embargo.

The embargo itself has been in place since 1960 — sixty-six years. Every American administration since Eisenhower has maintained some version of it. None has produced regime change. The Cuban government has survived the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, the Special Period, the collapse of Venezuelan subsidies, and more than 240 sanctions imposed by the Trump administration since January 2025. It has done so by a consistent mechanism: absorbing the suffering of the population while insulating the leadership, and using the embargo as a permanent and largely accurate explanation for the hardship that follows. The pattern is so well established that it has become self-perpetuating. The government blames the embargo. The United States blames the government. The Cuban people absorb the cost of the argument.

The architects of the current pressure campaign are Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, now Secretary of State, and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, whose father Rafael Cruz was born in Matanzas, Cuba, beaten and briefly imprisoned by Batista's forces in 1957, and fled that same year. What is rarely noted is that Rafael Cruz did not simply flee Batista — he fought alongside Castro's revolutionary movement against him. Batista was a U.S.-backed dictator whose regime the CIA actively supported and armed. The forces that beat the young Rafael Cruz were funded by the country he then immigrated to, bribing a Batista official for his exit permit and enrolling at the University of Texas. When Castro seized power in 1959 and declared himself a communist, Rafael Cruz turned against the revolution he had supported and became one of the most vocal anti-communist voices in Texas evangelical circles.

The full arc is remarkable. A young Cuban fights against a U.S.-backed dictator, moves to the United States, becomes a right-wing Republican pastor, and helps elect a son who now enforces the blockade against the country where it all started — a blockade that is causing the exact kind of suffering that drove his father into the streets as a teenager in Matanzas in 1957.

Both men view this moment as the most significant opportunity for political transformation in Cuba since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In March 2026, Cruz posted a video on his social media accounts predicting that within six months there would be new governments in Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran — the most ambitious foreign policy forecast made by an American politician in recent memory. Venezuela has indeed seen its government removed. Iran and Cuba have not. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, asked about his fate, said Washington does not decide it.

The humanitarian picture is where the contradiction at the center of the strategy becomes most visible. The Trump administration has imposed the oil blockade that has emptied Cuban hospitals of functioning diagnostic equipment and left the island's electrical grid in a state of sustained collapse. It has simultaneously announced $9 million in food aid delivered through the Catholic Church, explicitly bypassing the Cuban government. It has now offered $100 million in additional humanitarian assistance — announced by Rubio the day after meeting with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican, with the first American-born pope positioned as the moral guarantor of Washington's sincerity — conditional on the Cuban government agreeing to meaningful reforms. CIA Director John Ratcliffe led a delegation to Havana in mid-May to meet with Cuban intelligence officials and deliver the same message in less public language: fundamental changes, in exchange for engagement on economic security.

Díaz-Canel called the offer inconsistent and paradoxical, noting that Washington could do more for the Cuban people by simply lifting the sanctions causing the crisis that the aid is designed to partially address. The Cuban Foreign Minister initially called the $100 million offer a fable and a lie, then softened, saying Cuba was willing to listen. Negotiations are ongoing as of this writing. The geometry of the situation — blockading with one hand, offering aid with the other, conditioning both on political transformation — is a strategy designed to force a choice. Whether the Cuban government will make that choice, or whether it will do what it has done for sixty-six years and simply absorb the pressure while the population pays the price, is the question that has no clear answer.

What is filling the vacuum in the meantime is a revealing coalition. Canada announced $8 million for food and nutrition delivered through the World Food Programme and UNICEF. The European Union released €2 million for food and clean water. Mexico dispatched two navy ships carrying 814 tonnes of food supplies, with President Claudia Sheinbaum calling the American sanctions unfair to the Cuban people and pledging to continue despite U.S. tariff threats against countries that trade with the island. Civil society convoys organized by the Progressive International brought 20 tons of aid to Havana in March. Russia pledged to continue oil shipments but is constrained by its own war economy and the oil price collapse of 2025 — it sent one fuel shipment in late March that was exhausted by mid-May, and announced a second.

And then there is China, which is doing something none of the others are doing: building the infrastructure that could eventually free Cuba from the oil dependence that has made it so vulnerable for so long. China exported $3 million in solar panels to Cuba in 2023. That figure rocketed to $117 million in 2025. Cuba is currently executing one of the fastest solar energy transitions on the planet, backed by Chinese financing and Chinese equipment. The irony of the moment is that the American oil blockade, designed to collapse the Cuban economy and force regime change, is inadvertently accelerating Cuba's energy independence from fossil fuels and deepening its structural ties to Beijing. The long-term consequence of the maximum pressure strategy may be a Cuba that no longer depends on Venezuelan oil — because it has become a Chinese-financed solar economy in the Caribbean, as resistant to American pressure in 2035 as it has been for the past sixty-six years, and considerably more so.

The human cost of the crisis in the present tense is measured in a number that should stop any reader: Cuba has lost approximately 2.7 million inhabitants since 2020, reducing its population from 11.3 million to an estimated 8.6 million. A population decline of 24 percent in four years. Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged in July 2024 that Cuba's effective population had fallen to levels last seen in 1985. The birth rate has dropped to its lowest point in six decades — 7.2 births per 1,000 inhabitants — while 25.7 percent of the remaining population is over 60. Cuba is not just losing people. It is losing the young people who would build its future, and it is left with an aging population that cannot be sustained by the collapsing economy they remain behind in.

The routes by which Cubans have been leaving tell the story of a population using every available exit before each one closes. For years the primary path was a flight to Nicaragua — which required no visa — then an overland journey through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico to the U.S.-Mexico border, where more than 860,000 Cubans arrived between 2021 and mid-2024, a number larger than the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and the Balseros rafter crisis of 1994 combined. Nicaragua eliminated visa-free travel for Cubans in early 2026, closing that route. The Trump administration eliminated the humanitarian parole program and the CBP One application that had allowed tens of thousands to enter the United States legally, closing those pathways. The sea crossing of the Florida Straits — 90 miles in whatever vessel will float — continues, with the U.S. Coast Guard intercepting and returning many of those who attempt it.

With the northern routes closing, the migration map has shifted south. Cubans now enter Brazil through Venezuela or Guyana, where no visa is required, crossing into the northern state of Roraima. Regular Cuban migration to Brazil nearly tripled between 2024 and 2025. In Uruguay, the monthly net migration balance more than doubled. In Costa Rica, 94 percent of Cubans surveyed in early 2026 said they intended to stay rather than continue north — because there is no longer a reliable north to continue toward. The American Dream, for this generation of Cuban emigrants, is becoming a Latin American Dream by necessity rather than choice.

What remains on the island is a population old enough to remember the Special Period, living through something they say is worse, watched over by a government that has survived every previous version of this crisis by blaming the country that created the conditions and waiting for a new patron to arrive. The Soviet Union was the first patron. Venezuela was the second. China may be the third — not with oil tankers but with solar panels, arriving quietly while the blockade rages and the lights go out, building something that will outlast the current crisis regardless of how it ends.

Ted Cruz predicted new governments in Cuba within six months. The six months are not yet up. What is already clear is that the people most certain to experience the consequences of whether he is right or wrong are the 8.6 million who remain on an island that is running out of fuel, running out of food, and running out of people — and that has been making that calculation, under one version or another of the same American pressure, for longer than most of its current leaders have been alive.

Sources: CNN reporting on Cuba solar revolution, May 2026; Think Global Health on Cuba hospital crisis, May 2026; Electric Choice Cuba electricity crisis report, April 2026; IOM Cuban migration data, March 2026; CiberCuba demographic analysis, February 2025 and December 2025; University of Navarra Global Affairs Cuban emigration study; Canadian Global Affairs humanitarian aid announcement, February 2026; EU humanitarian aid press release, April 2026; Reuters reporting on Russian oil pledges, February 2026; Al Jazeera reporting on U.S. $100 million aid offer, May 2026; Cuba Headlines reporting on Cruz and Rubio Cuba strategy, March 2026; Wikipedia 2026 Cuban Crisis; Source Watch Special Period data; History of Communism Soviet collapse analysis.