Cuba in the Dark: The US Military Buildup, the Blackouts, and How It Ends
On the sixteenth of March this year, every light on the island of Cuba went out at the same time. Eleven million people sat in the dark for more than a day.
Tonight, three things. What the United States has moved into the Caribbean, and the question the Army quietly put to its own commanders this week. How an island ninety miles off the coast of Florida ran completely out of fuel. The four ways this ends.
Start with what is floating in the water.
On the twentieth of May the aircraft carrier Nimitz and its strike group entered the Caribbean Sea. Carrier Air Wing Seventeen flew with it. The destroyer Gridley came with it. The supply ship Patuxent came with it. Southern Command announced the move itself.
That same day the Justice Department unsealed a murder indictment against Raul Castro. The charge goes back to the twenty-fourth of February, nineteen ninety-six, when Cuban fighter jets shot down two small civilian planes over international water. The planes belonged to a Miami group called Brothers to the Rescue, which flew the straits looking for rafters in the open sea. Four men died. Five Cuban air force pilots were charged alongside Castro. The announcement was made at the Freedom Tower in Miami, the building that once processed Cuban refugees as they arrived.
Nine days later, on the twenty-ninth of May, the commander of Southern Command met Cuban generals at the fence line at Guantanamo Bay. General Francis Donovan sat down with Cuban Army Corps General Roberto Legra Sotolongo. American and Cuban officers do not meet like that often. The meeting came days after Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said an American assault on the island would cause a bloodbath with incalculable consequences.
This week another piece landed. CBS News reviewed a message sent out by Army Reserve headquarters asking subordinate commands what six types of formations might be available. The message said they might be needed in ninety to one hundred and twenty days, in Southern Command's part of the world. No units were named. No destination was named. No deployment orders were attached to it.
Take the document for what it is. Reserve units need that kind of lead time for anything. Soldiers have civilian jobs, families and employers who have to be told. Headquarters asks these questions through the year for rotations and exercises. A single availability request proves nothing on its own.
The problem for Havana is everything standing around it.
Reporting in July said planners had looked at an air assault option using the Hundred and First Airborne. That reporting has not been confirmed by the Pentagon. Surveillance aircraft have worked the island for months. Amphibious ships carrying Marines have been in those waters since last year under an operation called Southern Spear, which began as a campaign against drug boats and has killed eighty-one people at sea as of the ninth of September.
The President has not been quiet about any of it. In January he told Cuba to make a deal before it was too late. He talked about a friendly takeover. In March he said he thought he would have the honor of taking Cuba. On Tuesday at the United Nations he called Cuba a completely failed state and predicted the government would fall, and the Cuban delegation walked out of the hall while he was speaking. Earlier this week he said the United States may stop by Cuba once Iran is finished.
One more piece of this needs a straight answer, because it got a lot of play. Unnamed officials told Axios that Cuba had acquired three hundred military drones that threatened Guantanamo, American warships and Key West. Cuba's deputy foreign minister answered that any country has the right to defend itself and denied any plan to attack the United States. Commentators on the right and the left landed in the same place on that one. An island with no fuel starting a war with the United States is not a serious proposition.
Put that ninety to one hundred and twenty day window on a calendar. It runs from late December into late January. The midterm elections are on the third of November, which is before any of it.
Look at what is already down there, because it did not arrive this month. Southern Spear has been running since August of last year. Fourth Fleet ships, a Marine expeditionary unit, special operations aviation, and a rebuilt presence at Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. The stated mission was drug boats. The forces assembled for it are the forces you would use for something larger, which is why every country in the region has been watching the Caribbean for a year.
One more thing sits on that island already. The United States has a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, on Cuban soil, with American sailors and their families living on it. Whatever happens in Havana happens with Americans inside the fence, ninety miles from Florida and five hundred miles from Havana by road.
Measure the other side of it honestly. The Cuban armed forces are large on paper and equipped with Soviet hardware from the Cold War. Fighter aircraft need fuel, spare parts and flying hours, and this is a country that cannot keep hospital generators running. Diaz-Canel warning about a bloodbath is a warning about what an occupation costs over years, not about winning a fight at sea.
Watch what Havana has not done, because it tells you something. There has been no general mobilization announced, no mass call-up, no closing of the airport. The government has sent its foreign minister to deny that talks exist while its president admits they do, and it has kept its army in barracks.
Give the other reading of that indictment its due, because it is being made by serious people. Writers at Foreign Policy argued the charge borrows the playbook used on Manuel Noriega and on Maduro, with thinner ground underneath it, and that its real purpose was political theater aimed at Miami. The counter to that is simple. Four men were killed in nineteen ninety-six, the case has sat unfiled for thirty years, and a charge does not become false because the timing is convenient.
Here is the other half, the half that does not make headlines.
Marco Rubio spoke in New York on Wednesday and said Washington is open to talking. His words were that Cuba has a golden opportunity to put itself on an irreversible path toward a better future, and that the United States is prepared to be helpful if Havana is open to it. Asked about force, he said the preference is always negotiation and politics, without resorting to military force, while adding that the President has the authority and the duty to confront a threat to national security.
Two tracks are running at the same time. Warships and indictments on one. Generals talking at a fence line and a Secretary of State offering help on the other. Both are real, and both are meant to be seen.
How does an island ninety miles from Florida end up with no fuel at all.
Fidel Castro took Havana on the first of January, nineteen fifty-nine. Eisenhower began cutting trade the following year. Kennedy made the embargo close to total in February of nineteen sixty-two. That October the world came within a few decisions of nuclear war over Soviet missiles on the island.
Two events from those first years still shape what Washington can do today. In April of nineteen sixty-one, Cuban exiles trained by the Central Intelligence Agency landed at the Bay of Pigs and were crushed in three days. That failure hardened the government, handed Fidel Castro a victory he used for the rest of his life, and made Havana permanently certain that an invasion was coming.
Eighteen months later came the missile crisis. The settlement that ended it had a piece most people forget. Washington gave a public assurance that it would not invade Cuba, in exchange for the Soviets pulling their missiles out. That understanding was never a treaty and every administration since has treated it as expired, but Havana has cited it for sixty years and will cite it again if American troops move.
The Soviet Union kept Cuba alive for thirty years. Moscow bought Cuban sugar above the world price and sold Cuba oil below it. That arrangement was worth something close to a third of the Cuban economy.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety-one, the subsidy vanished overnight. Cubans call the decade that followed the Special Period. Rationing, blackouts, oxen back in the fields because there was no diesel for tractors, and people leaving on anything that floated. Two waves of that are burned into American memory. One hundred and twenty-five thousand people left from the port of Mariel in nineteen eighty. Roughly thirty-five thousand more came across on rafts in the summer of nineteen ninety-four.
Venezuela replaced the Soviets. Hugo Chavez signed an oil deal with Havana around the turn of the century. Cuba sent doctors and security people. Caracas sent oil, as much as a hundred thousand barrels a day when times were good. That deal kept the lights on for the better part of twenty years.
Venezuela's own collapse thinned the shipments. What ended them was January of this year, when American forces took Nicolas Maduro out of the country and his vice president took over in Caracas. The oil stopped.
Washington then closed the door behind it. Any country that sells or ships oil to Cuba has been threatened with tariffs. Since January exactly one tanker has been allowed through, a Russian ship carrying a hundred thousand tonnes of crude that docked on the thirtieth of March. In May a second round of sanctions hit the intelligence service and the interior ministry.
The grid did what a grid does when the fuel runs out.
On the sixteenth of March the national system collapsed and stayed down more than twenty-nine hours. On the thirteenth of May the energy minister announced that the country's diesel and fuel oil supplies were exhausted. The next day the eastern half of the island went dark from Guantanamo to Ciego de Avila. Havana has been living with blackouts of fifteen hours a day, and by July the controlled outages in parts of the capital ran up to thirty hours. Rural provinces have gone longer. Four nationwide blackouts have hit the island this year.
Look at what that does inside a house. Water pumps run on electricity, which means no power is also no running water. People in a capital city are heating water over wood fires. Trash sits in the streets because the trucks have no diesel. Diaz-Canel said tens of thousands of surgeries were delayed because hospitals could not guarantee power for the operating rooms. Food spoils without refrigeration, and there is no fuel to move what is left.
Go back to those two planes for a moment, because the shootdown did more than kill four men. Two weeks after it, Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, and President Clinton signed it in March of nineteen ninety-six. Before that law the embargo was a presidential order, which meant a president could lift it. Helms-Burton wrote the embargo into federal law. Only Congress can take it off now, and the law sets conditions before that can even be considered, starting with no Castro holding power and a transition government in place.
The same law gave Americans whose property was seized after the revolution the right to sue anybody profiting from it. Every president from Clinton through Obama suspended that part to avoid fights with Canada and Spain, whose companies had built hotels on the island. President Trump switched it on in twenty nineteen. The lawsuits have been working through the courts since, and in February the Supreme Court took one of them up.
The base at Guantanamo runs on a lease signed in nineteen oh three. Washington still sends the annual payment, a little over four thousand dollars. Havana has refused to cash the checks since the revolution.
Understand what the island actually sells, because it is not what most people think. Sugar built Cuba, and today the country that ran on sugar imports it. Tourism was the replacement until the pandemic emptied the hotels. The biggest hard currency earner left is doctors. Cuba sends medical workers overseas and the government keeps most of what the host country pays. Washington has spent this year going after those contracts, and it is working. Jamaica cancelled its agreement on the fifth of March. Cuba closed its embassy in Ecuador the following day.
The other export is people. Demographers who track the island estimate more than a million Cubans have left since twenty twenty-two, close to a tenth of the population, and most of them were young. A country cannot rebuild a power grid with the people who stayed behind if the ones who could fix it are in Tampa.
The Special Period is worth understanding because it is the closest thing to a rehearsal for right now. Calories dropped across the whole population. China shipped in more than a million bicycles because there was no fuel for buses. Farmers went back to oxen. Families kept a pig in a city apartment. The government survived all of it.
Two things saved the island after that. Tourism came back, and money started arriving from Florida. Cubans abroad send cash home to families, and that flow became one of the largest sources of hard currency in the country. Washington has spent the last several years squeezing the channels that money moves through, which hits the same households the blackouts hit.
The nineteen ninety-four raft crisis ended with an agreement between Washington and Havana on migration, and with a policy Americans came to know as wet foot, dry foot. A Cuban who reached American soil could stay. One picked up at sea went back. President Obama ended that policy in twenty seventeen. A Cuban who lands on a Florida beach today has no special protection, which changes the arithmetic for anybody deciding whether to get in a boat.
Two more things from the recent past belong here. In July of twenty twenty-one, Cubans came into the streets in dozens of towns on the same day, the largest protests since the revolution. The government cut the internet, arrested hundreds, and handed out sentences that ran past ten years for people who had done nothing but march. Prisoner groups counted more than a thousand political prisoners on the island at the start of this year.
The other one is whiplash. President Obama reopened the embassy in twenty fifteen and flew to Havana. President Trump reversed most of it in his first term. Cubans on both sides of the water have watched American policy swing every four to eight years, which is exactly why Havana does not believe any offer will outlive the administration that makes it.
Havana's own accounting puts the damage from American sanctions at eight billion dollars between March of last year and February of this one, the highest figure the government has ever recorded. Every year since nineteen ninety-two the United Nations General Assembly has voted to condemn the embargo, and every year the vote changes nothing.
The government has not only complained. It has moved.
Fifty-one prisoners were released in March. Two thousand and ten more were pardoned during Easter week. In June the National Assembly passed a package of one hundred and seventy-six pro-market reforms. The hundred-worker cap on private businesses came off. Cubans can now hold stakes in more than one company. Tourism and fuel trading were opened to foreign investment. In March, Diaz-Canel admitted for the first time that his government was talking to the Trump administration.
Those are not the acts of a confident government. They are the acts of one looking for a way out that does not end with it gone.
Both things in this story are true at once, and you have to hold them together to understand it. American pressure is what emptied the tanks this year. Sixty-seven years of a command economy is why the island had nothing in reserve when it happened. Cuba was having blackouts while Venezuelan oil was still arriving.
Four roads run out of this. An American military operation. A collapse from the inside. A negotiated exit. Or the government simply holds on the way it has for sixty-seven years.
Take the military road first, because it is the one everybody is watching.
What exists is real. A carrier strike group, amphibious ships with Marines aboard, months of surveillance, an availability question sent to the Reserve, reporting about an airborne option, and a federal murder indictment against the man who ran the Cuban armed forces for decades. What does not exist is an order. No units have been told to go. The Secretary of State is on the record saying force is not the preference.
The size of the job argues against it too. Cuba has eleven million people. Its military controls large parts of the economy and all of internal security. Taking an island is one problem. Holding it, feeding it and running it afterward is a much bigger one, and the bill for that lands on American taxpayers.
The second road is collapse from the inside. Protests have already happened, in Santiago and in parts of Havana, with people chanting for power and food. Every analyst who looks at this lands on the same question, which is whether the army stays loyal. The Cuban military is the spine of the government. In nineteen ninety-four, during the worst of the Special Period, it held. Nobody outside Havana can tell you whether it holds now.
The third road is a deal, and more has been tried there than most people know.
Washington's condition has been that Diaz-Canel step down. He has flatly refused. A deal that would have privatized the state oil company in exchange for American energy supplies was on the table and fell apart. In June, Rubio told Congress there are technocrats inside the Cuban government that Washington might work with. Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar named one of them in that hearing, Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, a colonel in the interior ministry and Raul Castro's grandson. Rubio would not confirm it or deny it. Axios reported in February that the two men had spoken, and the State Department declined to discuss it.
Havana's public position is that none of this is happening. Cuba's top diplomat in Washington told Bloomberg on the first of September that the channel for dialogue is at a complete standstill and there are no negotiations. Cuba's foreign minister said the same thing this week, which directly contradicts the President's claim that Rubio is deeply involved in talks with the Cuban government.
The fourth road is the boring one. They hold. This government survived the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, the loss of the Soviet Union, and the Special Period. Betting on its collapse has been a losing bet for six decades.
There is a problem with the negotiated road that almost nobody mentions, and it is written into American law. The President cannot lift the embargo. Helms-Burton put it in the hands of Congress, and the conditions attached to it rule out a deal that leaves the current people in charge. A President can ease rules around the edges. Ending it takes a vote in Washington that nobody has scheduled.
The property fight is waiting underneath the rebuilding plans too. Thousands of American claims from the seizures after nineteen fifty-nine were certified by the government decades ago and have never been paid. Anybody who puts money into a Havana hotel, an airport or a port is buying into land somebody in Florida may hold a judgment on. The Supreme Court is looking at that question right now.
Here is the piece that decides more than any of it. The Cuban military does not just defend the island, it owns the profitable parts of it. Hotels, ports, the shops that take hard currency and the system that handles money sent home from abroad all run through a military holding company. An army with a business empire has something to lose in a collapse and something to protect in a deal. Every transition that has gone quietly somewhere else in the world went that way because the men with the guns were offered a way to keep what they had.
Whatever road this takes, the same eleven million people are standing at the end of it. They are the ones with fifteen hours of darkness a day, no running water when the pumps stop, and a hospital that cannot promise the lights will stay on during surgery.
Now the part that gets the least attention and may matter most.
In Miami, a group of wealthy Cuban exiles has spent months drawing up plans for a country that does not exist yet. The Wall Street Journal reported the details this week. A Havana stock and commodities exchange. A provisional government. Floating power stations to fix the grid. An eight billion dollar rebuild of eight Cuban airports. Jorge Mas, who owns Inter Miami, says the President asked him what rebuilding Cuba would cost. Juan Omar Sixto, eighty-two years old, a former tobacco farmer who now heads a new Cuban-American Chamber of Commerce, told the group they have waited sixty-seven years and need to start. A Miami Herald poll of eight hundred Cuban-Americans found four in five supporting direct military intervention.
Everyone involved in this is working from the same template, which is Venezuela. Look at what that template has actually produced.
Maduro was taken in January. His own vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, runs the country. She stood at the United Nations this week and promised elections when the people decide the right moment, with no date attached. Maria Corina Machado, who won the opposition primary by a landslide, has been blocked from returning home seven times, three of them in the past week, and American officials have privately asked her to postpone. Nine months after the man came out, there has been no vote.
That is the honest warning for anyone expecting a quick ending in Havana. Removing a government and producing a democracy are two different jobs, and the second one is harder. Cuba is a harder version of it than Venezuela was. Venezuela had an intact opposition and an economy underneath the wreckage. Cuba has neither.
There is a cost side for Americans in every one of these roads, and it is worth naming before it arrives. A collapse with no plan behind it puts boats in the Florida Straits within weeks. That has happened twice in living memory. Guantanamo sits on the island, with American families on it. Whatever happens in Havana lands in Florida.
Ask who else could turn the lights back on, because Havana has been asking. Russia sent one tanker in March and has not sent a fleet. China buys and sells with Cuba and has not replaced Venezuela. Neither one is willing to pay for an island in America's front yard at a moment when both have expensive problems of their own. The friends Havana has left send statements.
What the island actually needs is unglamorous. Fuel to burn tomorrow. Spare parts for plants built in the nineteen eighties. Crews who know how to rebuild a transmission system. Money to pay for all three. The floating power stations in the Miami plans exist and work, and they can be towed to a harbor and plugged in within months. Somebody has to buy them, and that is a decision made in Washington rather than Havana.
Put a clock on it. The President said the United States may stop by Cuba once Iran is finished. That puts the order of operations in public. Iran first. The Iran war is in its seventh month with a rejected ceasefire on the table and renewed strikes expected after the election. Cuba, on that timeline, is not a November story. It is a winter one.
The off-ramps that exist are the ones already open. The reforms passed in June. The prisoners released in the spring. The generals talking at the Guantanamo fence. Whether any of them lead anywhere depends on one man agreeing to leave, and he has said no every time.
Here is where all of it stands tonight. The island is out of fuel, out of money and out of friends with oil. The government will not step aside and its own people are in the dark for a day at a time. The United States has moved enough hardware into the Caribbean to make every option live, and has told the world it plans to stop by once Iran is finished. Miami has the blueprints drawn and is waiting on a phone call.
What follows is my opinion, not reporting. Take it as a prediction and judge it later.
My read is that nothing military happens before the election. The order of operations is already public and Iran sits in front of Cuba on the list.
My read on how this actually ends is that it does not end with Marines on a beach. It ends with the Cuban army making a decision. Those generals own the hotels, the ports and the money flowing in from abroad. An invasion costs them everything. A deal that leaves their businesses intact costs them one man. That is the same arithmetic that ended governments in a dozen other countries, and it usually gets settled by soldiers, not diplomats.
Watch three things and you will know before the rest of us. Watch the fence line at Guantanamo, because a handover gets arranged general to general, not through a State Department press conference. Watch the tankers, because if Russia starts sending ships on a schedule instead of one in March, the squeeze has failed. Watch how Diaz-Canel leaves if he leaves, because governments like this one announce a resignation as a health matter, and that announcement would be the whole story arriving in one sentence.
My read on the winter is the part that worries me. If the grid is still collapsing in December, people get in boats. That has happened twice before in living memory and both times it caught Washington flat. Nobody is planning out loud for thirty thousand people in the Florida Straits.
One suspicion I cannot prove, and I will say plainly that I cannot. There has been reporting for a few years now about Chinese listening posts on the island, never confirmed by anybody on the record. If that reporting is right, it changes what this is about. An intelligence station ninety miles from Florida is a national security argument, not a humanitarian one, and it would explain why the pressure on a broke island has been this relentless.
Run back through where this landed. The hardware is in the water and the legal case is filed, while the Secretary of State offers help and generals talk at a fence. The island is out of fuel because the country that fed it lost its own government in January, and because sixty-seven years of command economy left nothing in reserve. The four roads out are an invasion nobody has ordered, a collapse nobody can predict, a deal that American law will not allow on the terms available, or a government holding on the way it always has.
Nobody is going to announce which road this takes. The pressure is designed to make the answer come from inside Havana. What the people living on that island want is a light that stays on and food in a store, and not one of the four roads promises them that quickly.
That is everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I am Brian Bullock of starborn studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com
Because everyone knows.
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