Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old resident of Havana, had gone without electricity for 24 hours when the grid flickered back to life on September 18. "They turned the lights on for an hour," he told reporters, "and then the grid collapsed."
The entire island went dark at 2 p.m. EST. It was the sixth partial or total blackout in Cuba in 2026 alone.
This is the country the Democratic Socialists of America sent 40 elected leaders to visit last October, hauling "solidarity aid" to the communist regime and praising Cuba's socialist model as something the American left should study and emulate. Forty delegates. To a country that cannot keep a light bulb on for two consecutive hours.
The devastating juxtaposition — DSA Democrats holding up Cuba as an aspirational model while Cuba's electrical infrastructure disintegrates and Cuban people live in squalor. Three of those six blackouts happened in July alone, which means the grid isn't deteriorating gradually. It's accelerating toward permanent failure.
Felix Estrada, an official with Cuba's National Electrical Union, assured the public that "protocols are now in place to begin the gradual restoration of the system." Gradual. After the sixth collapse. The protocols, whatever they are, have not prevented a single one of the previous five.
The Council on Foreign Relations published an analysis in 2023 that read like a eulogy: "Cuba's centrally planned economy has been mired by stagnation for decades. But over the past five years, the pillars propping up the island's already feeble economy collapsed one by one, sending it into a tailspin." That was three years ago. The pillars haven't been rebuilt. They've been replaced with nothing.
Cuba's defenders blame the U.S. oil blockade that began in January 2026 for the grid failures. The blockade is eight months old. The economic stagnation is decades old. Fidel Castro ran the country for 49 years and left behind an electrical system that requires foreign oil shipments to function at all. That's not an embargo problem. That's a design problem.
The DSA delegation didn't visit Cuba's power plants. They didn't tour the neighborhoods where families cook over wood fires because the stove hasn't worked in months. They flew in, praised the model, delivered their solidarity, and flew home to apartments with functioning air conditioning.
Forty delegates praised the system. The system has collapsed six times this year.
The lights came on for an hour. Then the grid collapsed.