I Went to Cuba When Trump Turned the Lights Out

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Published 6:30, MAY 5, 2026 A rolling blackout hits Centro Habana.

In early February 2026, Canada’s major airlines stopped flying to Cuba. They could no longer refuel there because of an executive order by the United States president designed to block all oil imports to Cuba. The current administration has made no secret of its wish for regime change in the country, and crushing the economy appears to be the weapon of choice.

As the shortages worsened, I wondered what that pressure looked like once it filtered into daily life. I reported from Baghdad during the 2003 US invasion, Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake, and Cairo at the height of the 2011 Arab Spring. Again and again, I’ve found myself in cities at pivotal moments when history is being written in the streets.

A street scene on a night of rolling blackouts in Centro Habana. The city’s power grid is divided into multiple sectors, with the result that one block can be lit while an adjacent one remains without power. A scooter headlight casts the shadow of a pedestrian onto a building during a rolling blackout in Centro Habana.

In March, I went to Havana. Canadians traveling to Cuba via the US must have a visa, which requires choosing a purpose for the visit: business, education, visiting family, and so on. I checked “support for the Cuban people.” American citizens cannot travel to Cuba for tourism, but there are multiple flights a day to Havana from Miami doing the round-trip without refuelling. Ironically, I flew into Cuba via the land of their tormentors.

The most visible features of this liminal period are the direct effects of the oil embargo. Most gas stations are closed, and when fuel is imminent, long queues form. At El Modelo station on Avenida Línea, the line starts the evening before gas is pumped, some drivers sleeping in cars. By morning, it runs two blocks. Cubans, like most communists, have learned to wait.

In the centre of Havana, a colectivo driver counts his money. Colectivos are shared taxis, many of which are vintage vehicles. After a long wait, Cubans jostle to board a bus in Parque El Curita, a few hundred metres from the Capitolio in the heart of the city. A man in a white Fiat pulls up next to a black Dongfeng SUV outside a Dongfeng dealership in the wealthier Miramar district of Havana. The brand, Chinese made, has become an increasingly visible presence on the island’s roads.

No oil soon means no electricity. The blackouts roll across the city like dark clouds, unpredictable but inevitable. Some darkened streets, already eerie from dereliction, become noir film sets, faces lit by the glow of a phone or the beam of a flashlight. Heaps of uncollected garbage smoulder in the gloom. For one full day of my stay, the overloaded electrical grid was down for the entire country.

Garbage has piled up in Centro Habana, and everywhere else around the city, as the government does not have the fuel to mobilize trash removal. “No tirar basura” translates to “do not litter.” On Avenida Línea in the Vedado district, a group of mostly elderly people wait for a bank to open.

With reduced power, connectivity is weakened, which affects the banking system. On a Tuesday morning at 11 a.m. in the Vedado district, a small crowd waited outside a closed Banco Metropolitano—grumbling, frustrated by damaged ATMs and sputtering electronic banking applications.

During a partial blackout, a group of young men play games on their phones while sitting on the stone benches of the Prado, a famed pedestrian mall in the heart of Havana. A vendor selling food from a barrel is called by an elderly man selling second-hand items on the corner of Galiano and Barcelona street, in view of the Capitolio in Havana. The inner court of the Meliá Habana Miramar hotel boasts a fish pond, food trucks, cafes, and tight security.

No power can also mean no water. People carrying plastic jugs and jerry cans by hand or with trolleys is a common sight. Schools and hospitals offer reduced services.

All of these privations add to the country’s long-standing woes dating back to the “Special Period” of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union—an aging, faltering power grid, inefficient local food production, state control of business initiatives, a weakened health care system. Havana boasts a trove of exquisite architecture spanning decades and styles from colonial to deco, modern to brutalist. But the city is slipping ever further down the slope of urban decay.

A man carries jugs of water in the Vedado district of Havana, near the university.  Many areas of the city have disrupted water supply due to the fuel and power shortages, but a shortage of drinking water has been a long-standing issue in the city.

When Fidel Castro died in 2016, his brother Raúl became the head of the party. Raúl is now ninety-four years old and has passed on the day-to-day running of the country to his nominee president, Miguel Díaz-Canel. Still, the Castro “clan,” including Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, are thought to be the puppet masters, guiding the military and its business conglomerate, Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A (GAESA). To the world beyond the island, these inner workings of Cuba’s power structures remain opaque. In late 2024, the Miami Herald reported that elites in the Cuban military have been using shadow companies to hoard billions in profits from key sectors, including tourism.

A tattoo artist at a studio in Old Havana works on a client’s back. Tattoos are extremely popular among younger Cubans. This artist describes his work as “dark.” Musicians and their fans mingle at a record launch at Malecón 663, a restaurant and bar run by a French national based in Havana. Only a few vehicles travel the Malecón on a blustery evening. The fuel shortage—but also corrosive ocean spray on a rainy night—keeps cars away.

Despite widespread repression, Cubans have demonstrated their frustrations. During one of the blacked-out nights of my stay, the clanging sound of pots and pans filled the city: a universal language of protest. But when and how “regime change”—or any other kind of political transformation—will unfold remain unclear, despite US president Donald Trump’s belief that he will “have the honour of taking Cuba.”

Quebec-based Air Transat states on its website that it will resume flights to Cuba in October 2026, while Air Canada says it will resume in November. While the US pressure campaign bears down, the future for the average Cuban grows harder to read, murky as stormy waters off the Malecón.

The post I Went to Cuba When Trump Turned the Lights Out first appeared on The Walrus.