Cuba has completely exhausted its diesel and fuel oil reserves, the island's top energy official said Wednesday, leaving Havana neighborhoods dark for up to 22 hours a day as a U.S. executive order enters its fourth month of blocking foreign fuel shipments to the communist-run nation.
Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O delivered the grim assessment on state-run media, telling Cubans what many of them already knew from sitting in the dark. Newsmax reported that de la O described the national grid as being in a "critical" state, with the country forced to run on domestic crude oil, natural gas, and whatever renewable energy its solar installations can produce.
The crisis is the direct result of a January 2026 executive order that threatened tariffs on any country shipping fuel to Cuba. That order has effectively scared off suppliers, including Mexico and Venezuela, who once kept the island's aging power plants running. Since December, only a single large oil tanker, the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin, has delivered crude to Cuba, providing temporary relief when it arrived in April.
De la O left no ambiguity about the scale of the shortage. In remarks broadcast on Cuban state media, he laid out the situation in blunt terms:
"We have absolutely no fuel (oil), and absolutely no diesel."
He followed that with an even starker declaration: "We have no reserves." For a Caribbean island of nearly 10 million people, the admission amounted to a public concession that the state cannot keep the lights on.
Many neighborhoods across Havana have gone without electricity for 20 to 22 hours a day, the minister said. Blackouts have increased dramatically this week and last, crippling public services across the capital. Hospitals, water pumping stations, and basic commerce all depend on a grid that now has almost nothing to burn.
The collapse did not arrive overnight. Cuba's energy crisis has been deepening for months, driven by decaying infrastructure, chronic underinvestment, and a government that has spent decades blaming external forces while failing to modernize its own systems.
The current fuel exhaustion is the latest chapter in a cascading breakdown that accelerated earlier this year. In March alone, Cuba's national grid collapsed three separate times, plunging the entire island into darkness.
The New York Post reported that the third March collapse began after an unexpected failure at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey province. Cuba's Ministry of Energy and Mines said at the time that "a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online." The deeper causes, however, were structural: aging infrastructure, daily fuel shortages, and the fact that Cuba produces only about 40 percent of the fuel it needs.
Restoration efforts after those collapses were painfully slow. Breitbart, citing an Associated Press report, noted that after one of the March blackouts, only about 72,000 customers in Havana, including five hospitals, had power restored early on a Sunday. That represents a small fraction of the capital's roughly two million residents.
One Havana vendor, Dagnay Alarcón, 35, captured the resignation many Cubans feel. "We have to try to survive," she said. "Get used to events, with or without electricity."
The U.S. government has shown no sign of easing pressure. Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the blackouts not as a sanctions problem but as proof of systemic regime failure.
Just The News reported that Rubio told reporters at the White House that Cuba's economy is "nonfunctional" and that the country needs new people in charge.
"The bottom line is their economy doesn't work. The people in charge of them don't know how to fix it. So they have to get new people in charge."
The State Department has argued that decades of communist mismanagement, not American sanctions, caused the collapse. That position carries weight when you consider the timeline: Cuba's grid has been deteriorating for years, long before the January executive order. The regime's own inability to maintain its power plants, diversify its energy supply, or build a functional economy made the island uniquely vulnerable to any external disruption.
Meanwhile, some in Congress have pushed back. Rep. Pramila Jayapal admitted to speaking with foreign diplomats about getting oil to Cuba despite U.S. sanctions, a move that raised serious questions about whether members of Congress were freelancing on foreign policy to undercut the administration's leverage.
De la O pointed to one bright spot, literally. He said Cuba has installed 1,300 megawatts of solar power over the past two years. But solar panels cannot run a thermoelectric grid at night, and they cannot power heavy industry, hospitals, or water treatment plants around the clock. Solar is a supplement, not a substitute, for the diesel and fuel oil that Cuba's grid was built to consume.
The minister also said Cuba continued negotiations to import fuel but acknowledged that rising global oil and transportation prices, which he attributed in part to what he called the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, were complicating those efforts. He made an open appeal to the market.
"Cuba is open to anyone that wants to sell us fuel."
The problem is that few countries want to risk tariffs from the world's largest economy to sell oil to a small, cash-strapped island with a long history of defaulting on its debts. The executive order did not need to physically block tankers. It only needed to make the cost of doing business with Cuba higher than the reward.
The United Nations weighed in last week, calling the U.S. fuel blockade unlawful and saying it had obstructed the "Cuban people's right to development while undermining their rights to food, education, health, and water and sanitation." The U.N. statement will surprise no one familiar with that body's long record of siding with Havana against Washington, a pattern that has done nothing to improve life for ordinary Cubans.
Whatever one thinks of the sanctions strategy, the human toll is not abstract. Nearly 10 million people live on the island. Their government cannot feed them reliably, cannot keep the water running, and now cannot keep the lights on for more than two or three hours a day in parts of the capital.
The regime's response has followed a familiar script: blame the Americans, appeal to international sympathy, and rally ideological allies abroad while ordinary citizens sit in the dark. Cuban dissidents have pointed out the gap between the regime's defiant rhetoric and the grinding reality on the ground.
Cuba's president has confirmed that talks with the United States are underway, but no breakthrough has materialized. The leverage is almost entirely on Washington's side. Cuba has nothing to burn, nothing in reserve, and no willing seller brave enough to test the tariff threat.
The January executive order did not create Cuba's energy crisis. Decades of communist central planning, infrastructure neglect, and economic isolation did that. What the order did was remove the last thin lifeline, subsidized fuel from sympathetic foreign governments, that kept the regime's grid limping along.
De la O's Wednesday admission was remarkable not for what it revealed about American policy but for what it revealed about the Cuban state. After more than six decades in power, the regime cannot generate enough electricity to keep a hospital lit for a full day. It cannot maintain its own power plants. It cannot attract a single commercial fuel supplier willing to accept its credit.
And its answer, as always, is to ask the world for help while refusing to change the system that made the help necessary.
Sanctions are a blunt tool. But the Cuban government had 65 years to build something that works. The blackouts are not a surprise. They are a verdict.
