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cuba
Here Comes the Sun... to Light Our Way Out of the Age of Fuel Blockades and Oil Wars
We have a few humble but powerful tools—the solar panel, the windmill, the battery—that make it easier to imagine something other than our current nightmare.
Mar 03, 2026
For what seems like the 50th time in my long life, the US, with Israel, has attacked another nation, as per usual without an honest debate in Congress and so far with the reported deaths of both Iran’s leader and 80 or so of its schoolgirls. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the workings of President Donald Trump’s brain well enough to gauge the casus belli, but I will note—because again I’ve been around a while—that Iran has the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas and the third-biggest pool of oil (trailing only Saudi Arabia and, um, Venezuela).
As oil executives helpfully explained to Politico last month, they are generously prepared to be a “stabilizing force” in Iran should the regime fall—indeed, they’d rather do it there than in Venezuela because, as executives explained, “Iran’s oil industry, despite being ravaged by years of US sanctions, is still considered to be structurally sound, unlike that of Venezuela’s”:
Bob McNally, a former national security and energy adviser to former President George W. Bush who now leads the energy and geopolitics consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, said the prospects for growing Iran’s oil production are “completely different” from Venezuela’s.
“You can imagine our industry going back there—we would get a lot more oil, a lot sooner than we will out of Venezuela,” McNally said. “That’s more conventional oil right near infrastructure, and gas as well.”
In the meantime, our attack almost guarantees that the price of oil will jump, also good news for the industry that backed the president’s re-election so fulsomely. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported:
Iran and its neighbors on the Persian Gulf are some of the largest oil and gas producers in the world and the country has long threatened to disrupt oil exports as an act of self-defense or retaliation from attack.
That may be already happening. According to data from Bloomberg, some oil tankers are pausing or turning around outside the vital Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, deep channel between Iran and Oman that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and thus to global markets in and bordering the Indian Ocean.
But this kind of analysis is almost too easy, because so much of the geopolitics of the last century has been about the control and the flow of oil.
What’s interesting is the lessons others are taking from it.
Let’s look for a moment at Cuba, which seems like it might well be next on the Trump hit list. The president said Friday that he was looking for a “friendly takeover” of the island nation, and it’s clear that the tool he’s using is energy: After cutting off Venezuelan supplies, he’s also pressured Mexico to stop sending crude to Havana. As a result, he explained, “They have no money. They have no anything right now.”
Which is largely true—things in Havana have grown desperate in the last few weeks as Washington has tightened the screws they’ve been turning for decades. As the Spanish newspaper El Pais put it in a story, the entire nation is on “the verge of darkness” as energy supplies dwindle. It quotes a young anthropologist, José Maria:
He says the blackouts don’t affect him as much as others: His area is “privileged,” close to the water pump that supplies the municipality. He doesn’t have a generator, but he does have a rechargeable fan and a battery for his phone. From his apartment, on some days, he can see entire neighborhoods plunged into darkness.
As it happens, I went to Cuba to do some reporting the last time the country was in such a fix, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it Havana’s economic lifeline. In those days the country’s biggest problem was food, and it survived in part with a fairly remarkable turn toward urban agriculture. I was endlessly impressed with the Cubans I met who were learning how to grow the food their neighbors needed, even as I was depressed by the police state they were inhabiting.
Now the overwhelming problem is energy, and it’s here that something else quite profound has been happening: an almost unbelievable surge in the production of solar power. As The Economist reported on Thursday:
Mr Trump is obsessed with oil, but Cuba has been building out an alternative source of energy supply at record pace: solar panels imported from China. According to Chinese export data compiled by Ember, a think tank, in the 12 months to April 2025 Cuba’s imports of Chinese solar panels grew by a factor of 34, faster than anywhere else in the world. The island has gone from having almost no solar power a few years ago to levels which help it cope with Mr Trump’s embargo.
The regime’s energy policy is mostly responsible for the boom. In March 2024 the government announced a plan to build two gigawatts of solar power plants by 2028. It depends heavily on China for funding and construction, as well as for the solar panels themselves. On February 11 the government claimed that its new solar plants generated almost a gigawatt of power during the lunchtime peak, enough in that moment to meet the electricity needs of a third of the country.
With their help, life of a sort stumbles on. Here’s a Reuters report from last week:
“Given the frequent outages, which pretty much stop you from doing anything, a friend offered to help me invest in panels and set everything up,” Havana resident Roberto Sarriga told Reuters.
Sarriga said that with the help of solar panels he could have internet, charge his phone so people can locate him, and power a TV to keep his elderly mother entertained watching her favorite soap operas.
Most people can’t afford their own panels, of course—unless they have relatives abroad who can send them dollars. But private businesses often can, and on Thursday the government offered new tax breaks for businesses that undertake new renewable energy projects. Perhaps in response, the Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow small oil sales to private businesses.
“The strategy here is to show the Cubans and the world that the only lifeline that Cuba has left is the United States,” said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a nonpartisan policy and advocacy group in Washington. “That doesn’t mean choke them off. That means leave it clear that they have become a de facto dependency of the United States.’’
But it’s not the only lifeline. China has solar panels to sell, for cheap, and once they’re up your lifeline is the sun. And unlike the oil terminals we apparently bombed at Iran’s Kharg Island complex Saturday morning, there’s really no good way to strike at solar energy, because it’s inherently decentralized. Look at that picture at the top of this essay, of a small farmer washing off his solar panels; that’s a person set up to survive what the world has to throw at him.
That’s clearly the story from Ukraine, which has weathered Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on its energy infrastructure by building a new, harder-to-attack infrastructure. As Paul Hockenos reports:
Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”
Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.
It’s not just missiles, either. Iran, for instance, is widely regarded to have the ability to mount cyber attacks on centralized American infrastructure. As Rodney Bosch reported during the last round of US strikes on the nation:
US intelligence officials had warned that Iran might retaliate against American involvement by launching cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Electrical grids, water systems, and financial networks were seen as high-risk targets.
(On days like this, I’m glad I have solar panels all over the roof. )
China has obviously figured out all these lessons. It foresaw the attacks on Venezuela and Iran, two of its big suppliers of crude, and began to dramatically increase its oil stockpile. But of course it’s done something much more important: build out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.
Since 2021, China has added more power capacity across all energy technologies than the US has in its history, including 543 gigawatts last year, according to figures released late last month by the country’s National Energy Administration.
None of this is about ideology. China, Cuba, the US, Venezuela, Iran—all suffer from democratic deficits at this point (a sad list for an American to have to compile). It’s about power, in both meanings of that word.
And it’s about survival, as the rest of us imagine rebuilding a world that might actually work for its inhabitants. We have a few humble but powerful tools—the solar panel, the windmill, the battery—that make it easier to imagine something other than our current nightmare.
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The Architecture of Siege: Cuba, Gaza, and the Strategy of Everywhere at Once
The blockade is not foreign policy. It is a blueprint. And we have seen it before.
Mar 03, 2026
" Cuba is next," said Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday night in America, March 2, 2026, grinning between a Venezuelan surgical decapitation and an Iranian bombing campaign like a man checking items off a list. "They are going to fall. This communist dictatorship in Cuba, their days are numbered."
They are already falling.
They fall in hospitals without power. They fall in nursing homes without food. They fall in cancer wards where the machines went silent weeks ago and no one came back to restart them. They fall in kitchens where mothers boil water they carried for miles, over fires made from broken chairs and splintered tables. They fall in apartments dark for 20 hours a day, on an island 90 miles from Florida, while a United States senator smiles on television and calls it progress.
This is not a warning about what might happen to Cuba. It is a clinical description of what is happening right now, today, while you read this, while the news cycle skids forward to the next detonation and pretends the last one never happened.
The strategy is to open enough fronts to make sustained resistance on any single front feel impossible.
Since December 2025, the United States has seized oil tankers on the open sea, threatened tariffs against any nation that dares sell fuel to Cuba, and pressured Mexico into halting shipments. The timeline is precise: The first tanker seizure came on December 10. The last major fuel delivery arrived on January 9. On January 29, the executive order dropped, threatening tariffs on any country that supplies Cuba with oil. The island has not received a significant shipment since, and Bloomberg satellite analysis shows nighttime light levels across eastern Cuba have fallen by 50%. The island is going dark, and we can see it from space.
An engineer would call what followed a cascading systems failure. Fuel feeds the electrical grid. The grid powers the water pumps. The pumps keep millions of people alive, or they used to. Sever the first link and the rest follows with mechanical certainty, then human consequence, then preventable death.
Now the grid fails for up to 20 hours a day in parts of the country. Eighty-four percent of Cuba's water pumping infrastructure depends on electricity that no longer reliably exists, so taps go dry and pressure vanishes. Nearly 1 million people get drinking water from tanker trucks that are running out of diesel, which means even the emergency solution is collapsing. Five million Cubans live with chronic illnesses, and chronic illness does not pause for politics. Thousands of cancer patients have watched chemotherapy and radiotherapy simply stop, not because the medicine is gone, but because there is no power to deliver it. The United Nations resident coordinator in Havana has called it what it is: acute humanitarian risk, deteriorating by the day.
Cuba's population has plummeted from roughly 11 million to an estimated 8.6 million in five years, a peacetime collapse that demographers compare, for sheer velocity, to nations at war. Sugar production has fallen to its lowest level in over a century. The official inflation rate masks a real rate economists estimate near 70%, which means wages rot while prices sprint. Airports cannot provide jet fuel. Garbage trucks sit empty. Hospitals operate by flashlight, and a flashlight is not a ventilator.
And on Sunday, a senator from South Carolina went on television to say their days are numbered, as if the dying had not already begun, as if the darkness were not already inside the wards.
I am an engineer by training. I see systems. I also see what people do when they want to hurt civilians while keeping their hands clean.
Siege is a system.
It has inputs: fuel, food, medicine, money. It has choke points: tanker seizures, executive orders, tariff threats. It has predictable failure modes: grid collapse, pump failure, hospital shutdown, preventable death. It has a kill chain too, and it selects its victims with the cold efficiency of triage in reverse. The elderly go first. Then the chronically ill. Then the infants whose mothers cannot reach hospitals that cannot run incubators. Then everyone else, slowly, invisibly, deniably.
This is not new. The architecture is old. Only the language changes, and the public gets trained to hear that language as policy instead of violence.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, supply lines were severed, medical infrastructure collapsed, and a population was sealed inside and slowly starved. The authorities described it as a public health measure. The engineers of that system understood that you do not need to kill people directly if you can cut off what keeps them alive and let time do the rest. In Gaza, the same architecture returned: fuel cut, hospitals dark, water systems destroyed, international law invoked by everyone and enforced by no one, while cameras rolled and the death toll climbed and the world performed its anguish on schedule and moved on.
Cuba, March 2026: tankers seized on the open sea. Airports grounded. Cancer wards without power. A population that increasingly cannot leave because Nicaragua has closed its visa-free corridor and the Florida Straits remain as lethal as ever. The Supreme Court struck down the tariff mechanism that underpins the blockade, and the administration has shown no sign of relenting. Not a pause, not a pivot, not even the decency of shame.
The architect of this particular siege is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American whose parents left the island before Fidel Castro took power. He has spent a career positioning himself for this moment. That a man whose family left the island seeking a better life now engineers another for the millions who remain is not irony. It is the kind of cruelty that requires a surname and a face.
I am not calling this a genocide. I am describing a pattern, because the pattern is visible if you stop letting the headlines drag your eyes away. Civilian populations besieged through infrastructure strangulation. Justified by the language of regime change. Enabled by the manufactured exhaustion of everyone who might object.
That exhaustion is not an accident. It is the strategy.
I have spent the past year documenting how this administration builds systems designed to break people slowly. Detention facilities that warehouse human beings indefinitely while the paperwork dissolves—70,000 detained and climbing at 3,000 a month, with the courts gutted too fast to process them. Environmental protections gutted by executive order faster than any court can respond. Regulatory frameworks designed to expire by default if no one has the resources to defend them. The cruelty is not always loud, but it is always organized, and it always counts on you to look away.
Cuba is not a different story. It is the same story, told in Spanish, 90 miles from shore, with an ocean in between that is treated like a moat around your conscience.
Consider the sequence. In January, Venezuela was struck and its president seized. On January 29, the executive order blockading Cuba dropped, pushing its population into darkness. This weekend, Iran was struck. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to operate in American cities under rules that courts have challenged and the administration ignores. Detention capacity expands. Environmental rollbacks accelerate. Each crisis buries the last, and the burial is the point.
Venezuela buried the detention story. Iran buried Venezuela. Cuba is being buried by Iran. And by Tuesday, something new will bury Cuba, because the machine does not rest and it does not need your agreement. It only needs your fatigue.
This is not incompetence. It is architecture. The strategy is to open enough fronts to make sustained resistance on any single front feel impossible. To overwhelm not just governments and institutions but the moral attention of ordinary citizens. To make atrocity feel normal, ambient, inevitable, like background noise you learn to tune out because it hurts too much to keep hearing it.
Every authoritarian project in history has relied on the same calculation: The public's capacity for outrage is finite and can be outpaced. Move fast enough. Break enough things at once. People stop tracking the damage. Then silence arrives, and even when silence is not consent, it functions like consent, and the architects know that. They build for it.
We said, "Never again" after the Holocaust. We said it while watching Gaza in what should have been real time but always felt like delay. We are saying it now, about everything and nothing, the words worn down by repetition, polished by overuse, easy to carry and easier to abandon.
Cuba is 90 miles from Florida. The people are real. The starvation is real. The hospitals are dark. Cancer patients are dying. Water is not coming. And a United States senator went on television Sunday evening and smiled about it.
So here is the test, and it is not abstract. The lesson of "never again," apparently, is that it has a radius. It has an attention span. It has an expiration date. The architects of this era know exactly how to exploit all three, and they do it in plain sight, with clean suits and confident voices and a grin that dares you to care.
Do not let them.
Do not let Cuba become the crisis you meant to care about but never quite got around to, wedged between the bombing and the raid and the next emergency engineered to make you forget the last one. Do not outsource your moral attention to the news cycle. Do not accept exhaustion as an excuse. Do not accept policy language as a mask for suffering.
The siege is the strategy. The overwhelm is the weapon. And your attention, right now, today, is the one thing they cannot seize on the open sea.
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'Cuba's Next,' Says Lindsey Graham as Illegal Trump-Israel War on Iran Kills Hundreds
"Trump 2.0 seems to be about regime change," said one observer.
Mar 02, 2026
As American and Israeli bombs kill hundreds of Iranians—reportedly including at least 180 students and others at a girl's school in Minab—Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that President Donald Trump is "on a roll" and that Cuba is the next nation in the US regime change crosshairs.
In an interview on Fox News, Graham (R-SC) said prematurely that "Trump finished the job" that former President Ronald Reagan "failed to do," namely, destroy Iran's Islamist government after the overthrow of a brutal US-backed monarchy in 1979. "I am a big admirer of Ronald Reagan but I'm here to tell you that Donald Trump, in my opinion, is the gold standard for Republicans, maybe any president, when it comes to foreign policy."
"Maduro—everybody talked about him, well, Donald Trump's got him in jail," Graham said of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was abducted along with his wife two months by invading US forces.
"Cuba's next. They're gonna fall," Graham said of the revolutionary government in Havana that's outlasted a dozen American presidents, despite decades of US-led assassination attempts, sabotage, and subversion. "This communist dictatorship in Cuba, their days are numbered."
Lindsey Graham: Cuba is next. They are going to fall. Their days are numbered. pic.twitter.com/XZd1PyIqDP
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 2, 2026
The remarks by Graham—who previously berated Trump as a "jackass," "nut job," and "loser" unfit to be commander-in-chief—come amid reporting that Trump is feeling buoyed by what he views as successful attacks on Iran and Venezuela.
"The president is feeling like, 'I'm on a roll,' like, 'This is working,'" one unnamed Trump administration official told the Atlantic's Vivian Salama over the weekend.
This, from a president who said he deplored regime change and vowed "no new wars" while running for reelection.
A day before launching the US-Israeli war of choice against Iran, Trump floated what he described as a "friendly takeover" of Cuba, prompting vehement condemnation from Havana. Cuba is already suffering under decades of US sanctions that have devastated the socialist nation's economy and the well-being of its people.
In January, Trump issued an executive order baselessly declaring that Cuba poses "an unusual and extraordinary threat" to US national security and tightening the blockade to further starve the island of fuel.
Trump 2.0 seems to be about regime change. Is Cuba next? Listen onApple: interc.pt/40A4gef Spotify: interc.pt/4aKpVqd Elsewhere: interc.pt/4l53fod@mjbusta.bsky.social @andrespertierra.bsky.social @akelalacy.bsky.social
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— The Intercept (@theintercept.com) March 1, 2026 at 8:56 AM
Graham has backed every single US war since he was elected to Congress in 1994 and has openly advocated regime change in Cuba for more than a decade. He has also been accused of incitement to genocide for urging Israel to "level" Gaza—whose border crossings Israel has closed again, citing the attack on Iran.
Graham's support for regime change in Iran has been condemned across the political spectrum, from progressive Democrats including Rep. Ro Khanna of California to far-right figures like the late activist Charlie Kirk—who lambasted the senator's hawkish stance as "pathologically insane" shortly before his assassination last year.
If the US does strike Cuba, it would be the 11th country attacked during Trump’s two terms in the White House. The president—who has said he feels snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize—has bombed Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen, as well as dozens of boats allegedly transporting drugs in international waters in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.
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