The total collapse of Cuba’s main electrical grid last weekend is just the most visible aspect of the acute humanitarian crisis facing the Cuban people, a crisis marked by shortages of food, medicine, fuel, and the breakdown of essential public services.
Like a hurricane intensifying as it crosses warm waters, this crisis has been gradually gathering force since 2019. It has already driven more than a million Cubans to leave the island, most of whom have come to the United States, aggravating the migration problem on the southern border. Until now, Washington has done almost nothing to ease the root causes driving Cuban emigration, even as they have grown worse.
The total collapse of Cuba’s main electrical grid last weekend is just the most visible aspect of the acute humanitarian crisis facing the Cuban people, a crisis marked by shortages of food, medicine, fuel, and the breakdown of essential public services.
Like a hurricane intensifying as it crosses warm waters, this crisis has been gradually gathering force since 2019. It has already driven more than a million Cubans to leave the island, most of whom have come to the United States, aggravating the migration problem on the southern border. Until now, Washington has done almost nothing to ease the root causes driving Cuban emigration, even as they have grown worse.
Electrical blackouts, or “apagones” as the Cubans call them, aggravate all the other aspects of the crisis. Without electricity, water pumps can’t deliver a reliable water supply. Food acquired at great expense, both in terms of money and time waiting on lines, spoils in the refrigerator. Gas stations cannot pump gas, shutting down public transportation. Schools, factories, and private businesses cannot open.
The problems in Cuba’s energy sector have been building since the 1990s. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was no longer willing to provide Cuba with cheap oil in exchange for sugar. The ensuing decade of economic hardship, called the “Special Period,” saw the first blackouts, for want of fuel to power Cuba’s thermoelectric plants.
Cuba got a reprieve of sorts in the early 2000s, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez began selling cheap oil to Cuba in exchange for the services of Cuban medical professionals and other experts deployed into the poor barrios that were the backbone of Chavez’s electoral support.
But as Venezuela’s oil production has declined due to mismanagement, its exports to Cuba have fallen from more than 100,000 barrels per day at its peak to only a quarter of that today. Mexico and Russia have chipped in to help, but the supply is still far short of the island’s needs, and Cuba does not have the money to cover the deficit.
Besides the problem of an inadequate fuel supply, the infrastructure of the electrical grid is falling apart. Most of its equipment is decades beyond its normal useful life. Deferred maintenance, plus the corrosive effects of Venezuela’s and Cuba’s own sulfurous oil, have left it prone to chronic breakdown. Like the 1950s automobiles still plying Cuba’s roadways, the grid is kept in operation by sheer ingenuity and baling wire.
Equipment failures have triggered unscheduled blackouts with increasing frequency over the past few years, but the larger problem today is the government’s inability to keep the thermoelectric plants running for lack of fuel. Long hours of scheduled blackouts have become the norm, even in Havana, which was mostly spared that indignity until this year.
Central to both the energy crisis and the broader humanitarian crisis is Cuba’s macroeconomic decline. In 2019, the economy was suffering from a variety of structural inefficiencies as it tried to shift from central planning to market-oriented socialism.
Then it was hit with two external shocks: former U.S. President Donald Trump’s intensified sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, they closed the Cuban tourist industry—the central pillar of the domestic economy—and reduced remittances by two-thirds. Foreign exchange earnings fell by 45 percent, and imports fell by more than half. The economy has yet to recover.
Blackouts have been one of the principal catalysts for political protest. The demonstration that erupted in the town of San Antonio de los Baños on July 11, 2021, and spontaneously spread across the island was initially organized to protest blackouts. Videos of the protesters went viral on social media, sparking more than a hundred other demonstrations across the island, some involving thousands of people.
Smaller demonstrations have erupted frequently since then in neighborhoods plagued by blackouts, in cities from Havana to Santiago. There are reports of protests in several cities during the nationwide blackouts over the weekend.
Despite his 2020 campaign promise to return to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy of engagement “in large part,” President Joe Biden has left most of Trump’s sanctions in place, continuing to starve the Cuban economy of foreign exchange earnings even as the humanitarian crisis has deepened. Congressional supporters of sanctions have held other legislative priorities hostage to deter Biden from offering any relief. They have consistently opposed even humanitarian aid as a bailout of the regime.
The proponents of regime change should be careful what they wish for. A collapse of the Cuba regime would be a humanitarian disaster, spurring an emigration tsunami far larger than what we have seen so far. A breakdown of social order could unleash a surge of criminal violence, prompting some Cuban Americans to set out for Cuba to rescue family members, as they did in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift. Others would demand U.S. military intervention, as they did in response to the largely peaceful protests in July 2021.
Regime collapse would also open the door to transnational organized criminal groups, which would like nothing better than to be able to use Cuba as a platform for narcotics trafficking through the Caribbean—routes closed for the past two decades by U.S.-Cuban cooperation on narcotics interdiction. That cooperation has been so critical to the war on drugs, and so effective, that it was sustained even by former Presidents George W. Bush and Trump.
Biden has described his Cuba policy as being “tough” on the Cuban government while supporting the Cuban people. The reality, however, is that starving the Cuban government of resources has the effect of starving the Cuban people when there is no money to import food, and leaving them in the dark when there is no money to import oil. No matter how one apportions blame for Cuba’s economic disaster, there is no doubt that U.S. sanctions are making the humanitarian crisis worse.
With only a few months remaining in office, Biden should take steps to really support the Cuban people, who need it now more than ever. He could offer humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicine, and fund private U.S. contractors to work with the Cuban electric company to stabilize the grid.
He could lift existing sanctions on oil tanker companies that carry Venezuelan oil to Cuba, sanctions left from the era when Washington recognized Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president. Now that Chevron can sell Venezuelan oil in the United States, the sanctions on vessels serving Cuba are an anachronism.
Biden could go further and lift Trump’s sanctions on travel and international commerce that have hampered the Cuban economy’s ability to recover from COVID-19.
There are precedents for offering Cuba humanitarian assistance. President George W. Bush, no friend of the Cuban regime, offered help several times in the wake of hurricanes. The Biden administration provided $2 million in relief after Hurricane Ian.
In August 2022, when lightning touched down and started a massive fire at the Matanzas oil depot, the Biden administration reacted too slowly to Cuban calls for international help to extinguish it. Instead, Mexico and Venezuela stepped forward, winning the goodwill that the United States could have won. Cuba’s energy crisis offers a second chance, a new opportunity for Washington to demonstrate that despite the deep differences between the United States and Cuba, being a good neighbor means coming to the aid of a neighbor in distress.
The post By Helping Cuba, Washington Would Be Helping Itself appeared first on Foreign Policy.
