Two hundred days under siege: The silent asphyxiation of a people
So far in 2026 Cuba has received a single shipment of oil: about 100,000 tons of crude oil donated by Russia, nothing more. More than 1,400 megawatts of installed capacity remain inactive because of lack of crude oil.
The electrical system is sustained by what the island produces internally: national crude oil, gas accompanying wells and renewable sources, but it is not enough
Raúl Antonio Capote | internacionales@granma.cu
August, 2026
The sun sets over the horizon and the island seems to be shipwrecked in the dark; you can barely see distant glows, fireflies that dot the archipelago, like the position lights of a ship fighting on the high seas in the middle of the storm.
It may seem close in time to January 29, 2026, when U.S. President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order -2,207 words that declared Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy" of his country. But for 200 days an entire people has been subjected to unnecessary suffering.
With this argument, the same one that has served to justify interventions in dozens of nations, Trump enabled the imposition of tariffs on any country that dared to sell oil to the island.
"Cuba will not be able to survive," he declared that night to the press, showing no hesitation. It was not just a threat, the energy siege is not just another coercive measure, it is the turn of the screw of the collar of the garrote torture, it is poking at a wound that has been open for more than six decades.
To understand its uniqueness, it is necessary to distinguish it from the economic, commercial and financial blockade, made official on February 3, 1962, a policy of collective punishment that the international community has condemned on multiple occasions at the UN General Assembly.
The energy fence is something else.
It is the deliberate interruption of the flow of fuel to a nation which depends on it to make everything work: its hospitals, its water treatment plants, the pumping of water, its food refrigeration systems, transportation, schools.
Undoubtedly, the message of January 29 was clear: no one, under any circumstances, could supply Cuba without confronting the U.S. sanctions machine.
As if that were not enough, on the 1st of May, Trump signed another Executive Order internationalizing the siege, expanding sanctions on financial institutions and people operating in sectors vital to the Cuban economy. And, in June, the U.S. government sanctioned the state-owned Cuba-Petroleum Union (CUPET), the heart of the island's energy system.
The result: so far in 2026, Cuba has received a single shipment of oil of about 100,000 tons of crude oil donated by Russia, and nothing more. More than 1,400 megawatts of installed capacity remain inactive due to lack of crude oil, the electrical system is sustained by what the island produces internally, that is, national crude, gas accompanying wells and renewable sources, that are not enough.
The blackouts have become prolonged. In many regions of the country, outages exceed 22 hours a day, public transport has been drastically reduced, classes are held remotely when electricity allows.
The Besieged
But the most profound impact is not measured in megawatts, it is measured in human lives: more than 32,800 pregnant women face additional risks from the lack of power that affects health systems.
In the health system, which for decades was the pride of the island and an example for Latin America, hospitals work with generators that consume the fuel that does not arrive, intensive care units operate at the limit, ambulances circulate with extreme rationing.
Desperation has a face: the face of mothers who cannot cook, sick people who cannot refrigerate their medicines, elderly people and children who endure the tropical heat without ventilation.
This energetic fence has predecessors, but none exactly the same. History records sieges that sought to surrender populations due to hunger or cold; for example, the siege of Leningrad, which lasted 872 days and claimed more than a million lives, but those occurred in declared conflicts.
Against Cuba it is different. There are no tanks on the borders, no bombs falling on the cities, it is an asphyxiation administered from a distance, without firing a single shot.
UN human rights experts have described this measure as "a serious violation of international law and a serious threat to a democratic and equitable international order".
The Cuban government has taken it to the United Nations General Assembly, where it has described it as "an act of genocide" and "collective punishment."
These are not rhetorical exaggerations, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines as such acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national group.
How many generations must suffer the consequences of a policy designed to make life in a nation unviable for genocide to be called genocide?
Those Resisting
And yet, the island has not surrendered, because resistance is, for Cubans, a way of life learned in six decades of blockade.
Cuba has drilled new oil wells and reversed the downward trend in its domestic crude oil production; it has installed more than 50 photovoltaic solar parks that contribute more than a thousand megawatts and generate, in the hours of greatest sunshine, 38% of the energy consumed during daytime hours.
It has recovered 348 megawatts of thermal generation in plants that were out of service. It's not enough, but it's all we have. The neighbors share the generator that works, the candle that illuminates, the little fuel that remains. Solidarity is not an abstract concept in Cuba: it is the only currency that still circulates.
The world watches, the world knows, but the world, for the most part, does not act.
Airlines have suspended their flights to Havana; international companies withdraw their investments; the fear of secondary sanctions, the punishment for trading with Cuba, has paralyzed the international community, but not the solidarity of the peoples.
We arrive at 200 days, a cold, administrative figure, which says nothing about the children who have died and who previously survived without any problem, in a country where infant mortality was less than five per thousand live births, at the level of a few developed nations.
A figure that says nothing about the absence of drugs to deal with cancer, about the old man who died of a curable disease. A figure that says nothing about children who grow up with the constant murmur of generators as a soundtrack to their childhood.
We are facing a decision taken in Washington, with all its consequences, while Washington fails to assume any responsibility.
Cuba has been under the energy siege for 200 days, on top of 66 years under the blockade. Cuba has existed for centuries against all odds, defying the logic of the empires that have wanted to bend it.
And yet, darkness is not the end. The archipelago resists the onslaught of bad weather, while sailing transfigured in those expeditionary boats that came to liberate their land from Spanish colonialism -small boats that, in the light of dawn, merge into a single and immense yacht.
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