Opinion: The U.S. oil blockade crashed Cuba's power grid again. Washington should trade collective punishment for a real humanitarian carve-out.

Just after 1 p.m. in Havana on Friday, a transmission line linking Matanzas and Cienfuegos tripped. Within minutes the fault cascaded across the island, and by 2 p.m. Cuba's national grid had split apart and collapsed entirely, cutting power to roughly 9 million people. It was, by most counts, the eighth total blackout Cuba has suffered in 2026 alone, and the twelfth since the grid first began failing on this scale in late 2024. Two days later, restoration was still crawling: barely a fifth of Havana's 862,732 customers had power back Friday night, and hospitals were running on diesel generators that themselves depend on fuel the country does not have.

Cuba's electrical system has been decrepit for decades, and its government deserves a large share of blame for that. But the proximate cause of this particular collapse, and of the seven before it this year, is not a mystery. The island needs more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day to keep its power plants running and produces well under half of that domestically. Roughly 1,300 megawatts of generating capacity — enough to matter enormously in a blackout — now sits idle for lack of imported fuel. That fuel stopped arriving in the volumes Cuba needs because the United States decided, deliberately and as a matter of stated policy, to cut it off.

This is worth saying plainly on the pages of an American newspaper, because it is an American policy choice with an American paper trail, and because nine months into it, the choice deserves an honest accounting of what it has bought.

A blockade built for collapse

On January 29, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14380, declaring a national emergency with respect to Cuba and authorizing tariffs on any country that "directly or indirectly" supplies oil to the island. The mechanism was elegant in its bluntness: rather than sanctioning Cuba's oil suppliers directly, Washington threatened to tax anyone who sold Havana a barrel. Mexico halted shipments within days. Venezuelan supply, already Cuba's lifeline, was disrupted after the U.S. detained President Nicolás Maduro. By March, the island's grid had collapsed for the first time under the new pressure — on the same day Trump told Fox News' Peter Doocy in the Oval Office that he believed he would have "the honor of taking Cuba," adding that Cuba was a "very weakened nation" and that he could "do anything I want with it." Secretary of State Marco Rubio was more specific about the object of the exercise, describing Cuba's government as unable to fix a "nonfunctional economy": "So they're in a lot of trouble," he said. "And the people in charge ... don't know how to fix it, and so they had to get new people in charge."

Treasury has since built out the architecture piece by piece. In June, the Office of Foreign Assets Control added Cuba's state oil and gas monopoly, Unión Cuba Petróleo, to its Specially Designated Nationals list. On September 3 — barely two weeks before this latest blackout — OFAC added five more state enterprises spanning banking, fuel wholesaling and nickel exports, along with an individual designation, in an action the State Department titled, without much subtlety, "Further Sanctions on Cuba's Elites, Financial Channels, and Resource Exploitation Apparatus." Each new designation makes it harder for any bank, insurer or shipper anywhere in the world to touch Cuban energy without risking its own access to the U.S. financial system. That is precisely the point, and it is also precisely why fuel keeps failing to arrive.

The human cost is not incidental

None of this is happening in a vacuum where only the Cuban government feels the pressure. Independent human rights experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded in February that the executive order was "a serious violation of international law," and by August they were describing conditions on the island as a "full-blown crisis" touching the rights to health, food, life and development. Uncollected garbage is piling up in Havana, raising disease risks; hospitals are losing the power needed to run cancer wards and refrigerate medication; irrigation and water pumping, both electricity-dependent, are failing alongside everything else.

"Food must never be used as an instrument of political pressure," United Nations independent experts said of the escalating sanctions, warning the crisis had become "full-blown" and was falling hardest on women, children, the elderly and rural farmers.

Cuban government data reported by outside monitors this year put infant mortality at roughly 9.9 per 1,000 live births, up sharply from about 4 per 1,000 in the years before the blockade; childhood cancer survival rates have reportedly fallen to around 65 percent; and domestic food production is down an estimated 60 percent. None of these numbers can be independently audited by a government as opaque as Cuba's, and Havana's own economic mismanagement — not just Washington's sanctions — helped create the fragility the blockade is now exploiting. But the scale of the deterioration, corroborated by UN monitors with no stake in flattering either government, is not something a serious newspaper's opinion page can wave away as propaganda.

Nine months, no regime change

Set aside, for a moment, the humanitarian case, and ask the question a policy like this should have to answer on its own terms: is it working? Miguel Díaz-Canel remains president of Cuba. His government has "categorically" denied negotiating its own dissolution. There has been no popular uprising on the scale the administration's rhetoric anticipated in March, when officials were reportedly targeting regime change by the end of the year. By July, Rubio himself was walking that timeline back in Manila, telling reporters, "I've never set a timeline for when change will occur or how it will look. I wish it were tomorrow because the Cuban people deserve a better future" — an admission, in substance, that nine months of engineered scarcity had not produced the outcome it was designed to produce.

That is the case against this policy that does not depend on sympathy for Havana at all. A coercive strategy that has not coerced the intended result, but has reliably produced blackouts, spoiled food, unrefrigerated insulin and a rising infant mortality rate, is not a tough policy succeeding slowly. It is a blunt instrument failing candidly, in public, on a schedule of roughly one nationwide grid collapse every six weeks.

A narrower blockade would do more

Washington does not need to abandon pressure on Havana's government to fix this. It needs to stop applying that pressure indiscriminately to 9 million civilians who have no say in Cuban energy policy. The administration's own regulators have already shown they know how to write a narrower rule: in February, OFAC issued a "favorable licensing policy" allowing the resale of Venezuelan-origin oil specifically for Cuba's private sector and humanitarian use, while excluding the military, intelligence services and other government institutions. That carve-out has been too small and too slow to matter against the scale of the collapse, but the template is sound. It should be widened, formalized and applied across the broader tariff and sanctions architecture — with a standing general license for fuel destined for hospitals, water utilities, food distribution and residential power, verified through the same kind of third-party auditing the U.S. already uses in other sanctions regimes.

• Executive Order 14380 (Jan. 29, 2026) authorizes tariffs on any nation supplying oil to Cuba, triggering the current fuel shortfall.
• Cuba's grid has now failed nationwide eight times in 2026, most recently on Sept. 18, cutting power to about 9 million people.
• UN-appointed human rights experts have twice formally condemned the policy, most recently in August, calling the humanitarian toll a "full-blown crisis."
• OFAC's own February carve-out for humanitarian fuel resales shows the tools for a narrower approach already exist inside the current sanctions framework.

This is not a call for unconditional engagement with a government that jails dissidents and has mismanaged its own economy for decades. It is an argument that the September 3 sanctions on Cuban banks and nickel exporters can coexist with rules that keep a children's cancer ward's lights on, and that a foreign policy which cannot tell the difference between the two is not principled toughness — it is carelessness dressed up as strategy. Congress, which retains oversight of Treasury's sanctions authorities, should demand exactly that distinction before the ninth blackout of the year arrives.