Cuba Has Survived 65 Years of American Sanctions. Now Washington Is Turning Out the Lights

In Guanabacoa, on the eastern side of Havana, women carrying small children gathered outside the municipal government building and demanded electricity. Their homes had been without power for between 30 and 50 hours. The taps had stopped because there was no current to pump water. Food was spoiling in refrigerators that had become cupboards. In another street, residents surrounded an electricity transformer and refused to let state workers take it away.

They had ceased to believe the assurance that the transformer was merely going for repair. In a country required to improvise around scarcity for more than six decades, a functioning piece of public machinery had become something a neighbourhood felt obliged to defend physically.

That scene is a better place to begin understanding Cuba than the conference rooms of Washington or Miami. Yet an essay published by The New York Times on 17 August, “Cuba Is Out of Time,” quickly moves from the suffering of ordinary Cubans to the futures imagined for them elsewhere: the collapse of Communism, a negotiated American-backed transition, or military action followed by something resembling a United States protectorate.

Its author, the historian Michael J. Bustamante, does not advocate all these outcomes. He warns, correctly, that intervention might substitute a new dependent order for democracy. But the structure of the argument gives away the assumption beneath the debate. Cuba remains an object of American policy. Its future is discussed as a choice among arrangements Washington might encourage, negotiate or impose.

The more fundamental question receives less attention. By what right has the United States spent almost two thirds of a century trying to make its neighbour’s political and economic system unviable?

The purpose was deprivation

The embargo did not emerge accidentally from the Cold War. Its intended social mechanism appears in the American diplomatic record.

In April 1960, State Department official Lester Mallory concluded that Fidel Castro retained majority support and that there was no effective domestic opposition. He therefore recommended employing economic pressure to depress wages and produce hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government. The language belongs not to Granma, but to a memorandum preserved and published by the United States Department of State.

The embargo began under Dwight Eisenhower, became comprehensive under Kennedy and survived the Soviet Union by more than three decades. Thirteen American presidencies have administered some version of it. It has failed in its declared political purpose under every one.

Cuba can trade with countries other than the United States. That familiar defence of the policy is true and radically incomplete. Goods must frequently be bought farther away, through intermediaries, with higher freight, insurance and financing costs. Machinery containing American components may be unavailable. A lawful medical transaction may still be rejected by a bank, carrier or insurer unwilling to examine Washington’s rules. Cuba is commonly required to pay cash in advance rather than receive ordinary commercial credit.

The power of the sanctions derives less from the bilateral trade ban than from the position of the dollar and the American financial system. A European or Asian company need not be American to fear an American fine, frozen assets or exclusion from the United States market. Overcompliance extends the embargo beyond its legal text.

In 1992, as Cuba entered the catastrophe following the Soviet collapse, Washington did not conclude that the Cold War policy had become obsolete. Congress tightened it. In 1996 it tightened it again. The objective was not merely to register disapproval of an authoritarian government. It was to exploit vulnerability until the political system broke.

How the island endured

For three decades the Soviet Union absorbed much of the pressure. It bought Cuban sugar at favourable prices, supplied concessionary oil, extended credit and provided machinery. That support allowed the revolutionary state to build universal education and healthcare while preserving an inefficient economy and replacing dependence on the United States with dependence on Moscow.

When the Soviet system disappeared, Cuba lost roughly a third of its economy and most of its protected trade. Fuel vanished, factories stopped and caloric intake fell. The “Special Period” entered Cuban memory as a time of bicycles, blackouts, hunger and extraordinary household improvisation.

The government survived by opening to tourism and foreign investment, legalising parts of the dollar economy and permitting limited private activity. Later, remittances from emigrants became a national life-support system. The diaspora produced by political conflict and economic hardship became one of the principal means by which the island withstood American policy.

Venezuela then supplied subsidised oil in exchange for Cuban doctors and other professional services. It was not simply charity: Cuba exported skills in which the revolution had invested heavily. But essential energy was again tied to the fortunes of a distant political ally.

Below these international arrangements lay the mechanisms of survival inside Cuba: rationing, subsidised services, family transfers, informal markets and the endless repair of machinery far beyond its intended life. The official expression is “creative resistance.” It contains both truth and evasion. Cubans have displayed remarkable collective resourcefulness. Officials also use the phrase to confer heroism upon privations that the governing elite does not experience equally.

Two medical systems

Healthcare offers the clearest contrast between Cuba’s social settlement and that of the country imposing the embargo.

The Cuban revolution treated medical care as a social right. It built neighbourhood clinics, trained large numbers of doctors, emphasised vaccination and prevention, and sent practitioners into rural communities that had previously received little care. For decades Cuba achieved life expectancy and infant survival approaching those of the United States despite possessing only a fraction of American income.

The achievement should neither be dismissed nor turned into mythology. Cuban statistics are produced by an authoritarian state and cannot always be audited as freely as American data. There have long been allegations that pressure to meet infant mortality targets affected the classification or management of high-risk pregnancies. More recently, emigration, low salaries, overseas medical missions and shortages have depleted the domestic service.

Cuba’s reported infant mortality had risen to 7.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2022. The United States recorded about 5.5 in 2024. American life expectancy reached 79 years in 2024. Cuba’s older reputation for matching or beating the United States on these measures can no longer simply be repeated as a present fact.

But the systems still embody opposing principles. In Cuba, formal entitlement does not depend on employment, an insurance policy or the ability to pay. In the United States, medical science can offer some of the most sophisticated treatment on earth, but access remains mediated by insurers, employment, deductibles, provider networks and personal wealth.

America spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, $15,474 for every resident and 18 per cent of its entire economy. Yet 27.1 million people had no health insurance at any point during that year. Many more were insured but exposed to deductibles, exclusions and bills they could not comfortably meet.

The Cuban failure is now largely material. A doctor may be available but lack the drug, reagent, functioning scanner, sterile equipment or electricity required to treat the patient. The American failure is distributive. The drug, scanner and specialist may exist a few miles away, but the price and insurance system can stand between them and the patient.

Sanctions operate throughout the Cuban medical chain. Finished medicines may be exempt, but healthcare requires active ingredients, laboratory reagents, refrigeration, packaging, sterilisation equipment, software, spare parts, transport and reliable power. A paper exemption is of limited value when banks will not clear payment or a supplier fears exposure to American enforcement.

None of this excuses Havana’s decisions. Cuba earns foreign currency by sending medical personnel abroad while its own hospitals lose staff. Central planning has often allocated resources badly. Buildings have deteriorated. Official secrecy makes honest evaluation difficult. Political prestige has sometimes been protected more vigorously than patients.

Yet Washington’s answer is to make every remedy harder to obtain and then cite the deterioration as proof of socialism’s failure.

The blockade found a system already failing

The present electricity disaster cannot honestly be attributed entirely to the sanctions imposed in January. Analysis by the independent Cuban outlet elTOQUE, using the state electricity company’s own daily figures, found that the worst deficits in the period examined occurred in December 2025. Cuba’s thermal stations were old, poorly maintained and chronically short of parts and investment before the latest American order.

That finding does not exonerate Washington. It establishes knowledge and consequence. The United States cut external oil from a system it knew was close to failure.

According to Granma, Cuba has received only one oil cargo during 2026, approximately 100,000 tonnes donated by Russia. More than 1,400 megawatts of installed capacity has stood idle for lack of fuel. In many regions power cuts exceed 22 hours a day.

Official and independent Cuban publications disagree over responsibility, repression and the depth of internal failure. They agree about the physical chain. Without oil there is insufficient generation. Without generation there is no water pumping, refrigeration, reliable hospital service, public transport or ordinary food distribution.

This is not pressure confined to Communist Party officials. It reaches the insulin refrigerator, the neonatal ward, the water tank and the fan above a child’s bed.

A market opened by siege

Havana has answered with 176 economic measures, opening additional sectors to private businesses and foreign investment without relinquishing Communist political control. More than 100 non-state operators have reportedly received permission to trade fuel wholesale. Private and cooperative businesses may obtain overseas finance and participate in activities once reserved to the state.

Washington, meanwhile, permits American fuel to be sold to selected Cuban private businesses while attempting to deny fuel to the Cuban state. The policy is constructing two economies: a dollar economy capable of buying energy and a public economy required to distribute scarcity.

Those with remittances, overseas connections or profitable businesses may obtain transport, refrigeration and private generation. Pensioners, public workers and families dependent upon rationed provision cannot. Economic liberalisation conducted under siege may produce neither socialism nor democracy, but a harsher class division in which electricity itself becomes a privilege.

The revolution that refuses to disappear

American sanctions have inflicted cumulative damage. They have raised the cost of trade, obstructed infrastructure renewal, deterred investment, encouraged emigration and made Cuba dependent upon geopolitical patrons. They have not overthrown the Communist Party, created liberal democracy or reconciled the two countries.

They may have helped preserve what they were designed to destroy. The embargo supplies the Cuban state with a real external enemy, reinforces the security argument for central control and allows domestic failure to be attributed to foreign aggression. A policy that weakens Cuban society can simultaneously strengthen the government’s political narrative.

The New York Times is right about one matter: Cubans cannot wait indefinitely. But the island is not “out of time” because it has failed to accept one of the futures imagined for it in Washington. It is being deprived of time, fuel and economic space by a policy whose original mechanism was the suffering of its population.

After 65 years, the burden of proof has reversed. Cuba’s government must answer for repression, bureaucracy, failed economic experiments and privileges concealed beneath egalitarian language. The United States must answer for a policy maintained across generations despite its failure on its own terms.

In Guanabacoa, the residents guarding their transformer were not defending an abstract model. They were defending the possibility of pumping water and preserving food. Washington may regard their desperation as leverage. Havana may call their endurance resistance. To the families standing in the heat, it is simply another night without electricity while two governments argue over how much longer they can bear it.