The sun sets over the horizon, and the island seems to be adrift in darkness; only distant glimmers are visible, fireflies dotting the archipelago, like the navigation lights of a ship struggling on the high seas in the midst of a storm.
January 29th, 2016, may seem like a recent memory, the day U.S. President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order—2,207 words declaring Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy" of his country—but it has been 200 days in which an entire people have been subjected to suffering.
With this argument, the same one used to justify interventions in dozens of nations, he authorized the imposition of tariffs on any country that dared to sell oil to the island. "Cuba will not be able to survive," Trump declared to the press that night, without hesitation.
It wasn't just a threat; the energy embargo is not just another coercive measure. It is the tightening of the noose, the reopening of a wound that has been open for more than six decades.
To understand its unique nature, it must be distinguished from the economic, commercial, and financial blockade, formalized on February 3rd, 1962, a policy of collective punishment that the international community has condemned on numerous occasions in the UN General Assembly.
The energy blockade is something else entirely; it is the deliberate interruption of the flow of fuel to a nation that depends on it for everything to function: its hospitals, its water treatment plants, its water pumping systems, its food refrigeration systems, its transportation, its schools.
Without a doubt, the message of January 29th was clear: no one, under any circumstances, could supply Cuba without facing the United States' sanctions apparatus.
As if that weren't enough, on May 1st, Trump signed another Executive Order that internationalized the embargo, expanding sanctions to financial entities and individuals operating in sectors vital to the Cuban economy. In June, the U.S. government sanctioned the state-owned company Unión Cuba-Petróleo (Cupet), the heart of the island's energy system.
The result: so far in 2026, Cuba has received only one shipment of oil: some 100,000 tons of crude donated by Russia, nothing more. More than 1,400 megawatts of installed capacity remain inactive due to a lack of crude. The electrical system is sustained by what the island produces internally: domestic crude, natural gas from wells, and renewable sources, but it is not enough.
Blackouts have become prolonged. In many regions of the country, outages exceed 22 hours a day. Public transportation has been drastically reduced, and classes are held remotely when electricity allows.
THE BESIEGED
But the most profound impact isn't measured in megawatts; it's measured in human lives: more than 32,800 pregnant women face additional risks due to the power outages affecting healthcare systems.
In the healthcare system, which for decades was the pride of the island and an example for Latin America, hospitals are running on generators that consume the undelivered fuel, intensive care units are operating at capacity, and ambulances are circulating with extreme rationing.
Desperation has a face: mothers who can't cook, patients who can't refrigerate their medications, and the elderly and children who endured the tropical heat without ventilation.
This energy blockade has predecessors, but none exactly the same. History records sieges that sought to subdue populations through hunger or cold; for example, the siege of Leningrad, which lasted 872 days and claimed more than a million lives, but those occurred in declared conflicts.
The situation against Cuba is different. There are no tanks on the borders, no bombs falling on the cities; it is a suffocation administered from a distance, without firing a single shot.
UN human rights experts have described this measure as "a serious violation of international law and a serious threat to a democratic and equitable international order."
The Cuban government has taken it to the United Nations General Assembly, where it has called it "an act of genocide" and "collective punishment."
These are not rhetorical exaggerations. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national group.
How many generations must suffer the consequences of a policy designed to make life in a nation unviable before it can be called genocide?
THOSE WHO RESIST
And yet, the Island has not surrendered, because for Cubans, resistance is a way of life learned through six decades of blockade.
Cuba has drilled new oil wells and reversed the declining trend in its national crude oil production; it has installed more than 50 photovoltaic solar parks that contribute over 1,000 megawatts and generate, during peak sunlight hours, 38% of the energy consumed during the day; it has recovered 348 megawatts of thermal generation capacity in plants that were out of service.
It's not enough, but it's all we have. Neighbors share the working generator, the candle for light, the little fuel that remains. Solidarity isn't an abstract concept in Cuba: it's the only currency that still circulates.
The world watches, the world knows, but the world, for the most part, doesn't act. Airlines have suspended their flights to Havana; international companies are withdrawing their investments; the fear of secondary sanctions, the punishment for trading with Cuba, has paralyzed the international community, but not the solidarity of the people.
We've reached 200 days, a cold, administrative number that says nothing about the children who have died and who previously survived without any problem, in a country where infant mortality was less than five per thousand live births, on par with a few developed nations.
Nor does it say anything about the lack of cancer medication, about the elderly man who died of a curable disease, or about the children who grow up with the constant hum of generators as the soundtrack of their childhood.
We are facing a decision made in Washington, with all the consequences, but without assuming any responsibility. Cuba has been under the energy embargo for 200 days, on top of 66 years under the blockade; it has existed for centuries against all odds, defying the logic of the empires that have sought to subjugate it.
The darkness is not the end. The archipelago withstands the onslaught of bad weather, sailing transfigured like those ships of the explorers who came to liberate their land from Spanish colonialism—small boats that, at dawn, merge into a single, immense yacht.
