Cuba On the Edge: How Fuel Cuts and Control Have Pushed the Island to Breaking Point
It’s 5:30 a.m. in Arroyo Naranjo, a municipality on the southern edge of Old Havana, Cuba. Twenty-seven-year-old Javier and his 64-year-old father Elías cannot remember the last time they walked side by side. This morning, they pick their way along the street in short, shuffling steps, the pre-dawn darkness so thick they can barely see their own outstretched hands. As they move through this outer suburb of the capital, the only sound is the soft murmur of neighbors chatting inside their homes.
Neither man has showered in more than a day, and their home has been without electricity for more than 16 hours straight. The blackout hit exactly when the regional aqueduct pumps water into their neighborhood, so all local water tanks sit completely empty. Hungry and thirsty, they split the last scraps of food left in their refrigerator—some chicken and the final two sausages from a five-pack—between the four people living in their home. If they had not eaten it immediately, the food would have spoiled. To cook the meal, they built a makeshift charcoal stove on their roof from scrap stones and wood planks; the entire municipality has gone a full month without any gas tank refills. Exhausted, they barely slept the night before: sweltering heat mixed with the putrid stench of overflowing trash bins blocking the corner street kept them awake. With no power for an alarm clock, they spent half the night half-conscious, acting as their own wake-up call to make sure they did not miss their mandatory appointment.
Javier and Elías were the first to arrive at the bus stop that morning. Before long, five more people joined them: four men and one woman. By 6:30 a.m., 30 minutes after the scheduled bus was supposed to arrive, the whole group decided to turn back for home. The transport meant to take them to mandatory military exercises—required for all members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Reserves—never showed. (Reserve training is held on weekends: Javier works in the tourism sector, and Elías is retired.)
This scene unfolded on a January Sunday, two weeks after the U.S. government removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela. Javier and Elías shared their story of the failed trip to the exercises with me during a video call, placed shortly after power was restored to their neighborhood.
The U.S. operation in Caracas, paired with former President Donald Trump’s aggressive public comments—“Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re going to hold out”—forced the Cuban regime to raise the country’s alert level to maximum. Officials rolled out a series of measures preparing for a declared “state of war,” a mass population mobilization strategy first implemented in the 1980s to respond to perceived external threats.
Javier, Elías, and the other reservists later received an explanation for the missing bus: all vehicles scheduled to transport reservists from Arroyo Naranjo and other nearby municipalities could not operate due to a total lack of fuel. “Stay in touch and stay alert,” officials told them. Elías summed up the moment for me: “What happened to us is Cuba today in a nutshell. We don’t have enough fuel for garbage trucks to collect neighborhood trash, and even if we were about to be invaded, we don’t have the resources to defend ourselves.”
A Country Starved For Oil
Cuba’s crippling fuel shortage has pushed the island to the brink of total collapse. Of the country’s 16 thermoelectric power plants, six are completely out of service—two of which are the nation’s largest electricity generators. Since early 2025, this crisis has left communities going days on end without power. Across the country, blackouts routinely last 12 to 20 hours every single day.
Cuba, home to 9.7 million people, has seen its economy contract by more than 15 percent since 2020. After my conversation with Javier and Elías, a national blackout cut power to nearly 64 percent of the country during the late afternoon and evening, the time of day when energy demand peaks.
Maduro’s removal by the U.S. added a devastating new crisis on top of all the other challenges Cuba already faced. Since Hugo Chávez’s presidency, Venezuela has been Cuba’s main oil supplier, and Maduro continued discounted oil shipments to the island until his capture. It is no exaggeration to say that Cuba survived—at least in terms of energy access—entirely thanks to Chavismo. Over the past two years, Venezuela supplied more than 50 percent of Cuba’s total oil needs. By late 2025, Venezuelan oil exports to the island hit roughly 30,000 barrels per day.
Now, Trump has ordered an immediate end to all those shipments. Cut off from its primary source of crude oil, Cuba is left completely exposed, a circumstance the U.S. president has openly sought to exploit as he moves to end Castroism. He has also imposed tariffs on any other country that supplies oil to Cuba, seeking to further isolate the regime and force it to negotiate.
The last cargo ship carrying Venezuelan crude arrived in Cuban ports in December 2025 with 598,000 barrels. That shipment, plus 84,900 barrels sent by Mexico’s state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) one week after Maduro’s capture, is all the regime has left to get through the coming weeks. The Cuban government had pinned its hopes on ongoing support from Mexico, but after intense pressure from the Trump administration, President Claudia Sheinbaum has only promised to send food and medicine for the time being—no crude oil.
According to energy consulting firm Kpler, Cuba’s existing oil reserves are in critical condition. Imported crude is essential to keep the country’s electrical grid running, transportation networks moving, and thus the entire economy functioning. Cuba’s leadership now appears to have only two options: negotiate with Trump to lift the decades-old U.S. embargo, or watch the country slide into total economic paralysis.
Choose: Food Or Internet Access
If the Cuban regime ultimately sits down with the Trump administration to negotiate a way out of its current crisis, internet access will be one of the most contentious issues on the table, and a top priority for government opponents on the island.
The Trump administration anticipated this in a June 2025 policy fact sheet, announcing expanded restrictions on the island while ramping up “efforts to support the Cuban people through the expansion of internet services, free press, free enterprise, free association, and lawful travel.”
When internet services first began to expand across Cuba in 2015, millions of Cubans gained access to the web for the first time in their lives, and the impact was transformative. The regime lost its decades-long monopoly on information. For years, the Communist Party—Cuba’s only legal political party—had shaped the national narrative however it wanted through its state-run media outlets. The rise of social media, where activists, artists, and regime opponents could share their work and messages openly, paired with the growth of independent media, empowered a dissident civil society that had long fought to be heard.
Six years later, in 2021, the opposition grew strong enough to challenge the status quo, calling for an end to repression and human rights abuses. Citizens took to the streets in nearly every Cuban city, demanding freedom, an end to dictatorship, and a new beginning for the nation. The regime responded with violence: one protester was killed, more than 1,000 were detained as political prisoners, and hundreds more were forced into exile. Finally, the government tightened surveillance and restricted access to the internet, which had been the central organizing tool for the opposition movement.
Since 2021, the Castro regime has doubled down on internet control as it ramps up repression to prevent another mass uprising.
ETECSA, the country’s only state-run telecommunications provider, has hiked internet rates in a deliberate move to cut overall usage. Today, Cubans can buy a basic monthly data plan of six gigabytes for 360 Cuban pesos (about $1.25). If they want extra data, they must pay 3,360 Cuban pesos (about $7.55) for just three additional gigabytes—an amount higher than the full monthly pension of most retirees (2,075 Cuban pesos, or about $4.65), and equal to more than half the average monthly salary of a state worker (6,506 Cuban pesos, or about $14.60).
According to state-run digital outlet Cubadebate, the average Cuban used 10 gigabytes of internet per month before the price hikes. Now, people spend far less time online because they simply cannot afford the usage they once enjoyed; the cost of that same amount of data now exceeds what most Cubans earn in a month.
My own mother, who lives in Havana while I live in exile in Barcelona, illustrates just how crippling these price hikes are. A few days ago, she messaged me on WhatsApp: “It’s not that I don’t want to write to you, son, it’s just that the money isn’t enough to pay for both food and the internet. It’s one or the other.”
Raising prices to cut internet usage is only one part of the regime’s strategy to silence discontent. The other part is outright repression, which takes the form of systematic digital surveillance of citizen opinions and content, plus the blocking of nearly all independent media outlets.
All these tactics have been thoroughly documented by human rights organization Prisoners Defenders, which mapped out the regime’s mass digital surveillance of ordinary Cubans in detail.
The regime operates “a panoptic social control ecosystem,” the organization’s report notes, whose core objective is “the neutralization of dissent, the inhibition of public debate, and the dismantling of independent social, civic, and political networks.” The report also found that 88 percent of surveyed Cubans “stated that authorities had cited their digital activity or messages as grounds for summonses, arrests, and interrogations.”
Dozens of Cubans have been sentenced to years in prison simply for their online activity. Aroni Yanko spent a year and a half behind bars after posting a meme to his WhatsApp status depicting Raúl Castro, President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and Prime Minister Manuel Marrero naked with unflattering tattoos. Mayelín Rodríguez Prado was sentenced to 15 years in prison after a Facebook post about protests in the town of Nuevitas, Camagüey province. Víctor Manuel Hidalgo Cabrales spent a year and four months in prison after writing a simple Facebook post: “Hey, Las Tunas, what’s up? They turn the power on for four hours and then turn it off for five or six. Are we just going to put up with this?”
Which brings us back to Javier and Elías. That night in Havana, hours after Trump posted the viral image of Nicolás Maduro in a gray tracksuit, cuffed and blindfolded aboard the warship carrying him to the U.S., the two men used the last of the battery on Javier’s phone (they had been without power for more than 10 hours by that point) to ask me if the news was true: was Maduro captured, and was Trump’s warning that Cuba would be next, now that Venezuela was gone, actually real? “Yes, it’s true,” I replied. I sent them a photo of Maduro and a clip of Trump’s comments about Cuba. When we spoke again later, I noticed he had deleted both files. I didn’t ask why.
Originally published in Wired en Español. Translated by John Newton.
