Rolling blackouts. A worthless currency. A once powerful industry on life support. Doctors, engineers and students are coming out in large numbers in search of the future. This all sounds like Venezuela, but I’m talking about Cuba.
As Venezuela’s crisis deepens, just 90 miles away in Florida another – quieter but equally dangerous – is unfolding. The drama may be small, but the danger is real. If Venezuela is faltering, Cuba is beginning to collapse.
Cuba on September 10 The entire electrical grid failedPlunging about 10 million people into darkness. It was the island’s fourth nationwide blackout in less than a year. Even before this, there was power failure for half a day in most parts of the country. Officials blamed the machinery; Cubans blamed the system.
The country’s energy network has become a patchwork of dilapidated plants and emergency repairs. It has suffered dozens of losses in the last 14 monthsnationwide cutsYears of neglect and the burning of high-sulphur crude oil have crippled its power stations. As US sanctions tighten on Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s ability to continue supplying oil to its ally has evaporated.
Fuel shipments from Venezuela – Havana’s economic lifeline for two decades – are now fluctuating wildly, sometimes falling below 10,000 barrels a day before rebounding. Russia andMexicoThere are steps with emergency cargo, but none provide stability. Without regular deliveries, plants wither and nights become suffocating. In some towns, residents cook by candlelight, charge phones at work, etc. sleep on rooftopsTo escape the heat.
The currency collapse has thrown daily life into disarray. Even the average state salary is equal Less than $20 per month At the unofficial exchange rate, well below the cost of living. Gasoline is scarce and extremely expensive. In rural areas, cars have been replaced by bicycles and horse carts. Tourism, once the island’s economic engine, has waned. more than half In the last decade. Even middle-class Havana is now enduring blackouts, empty shelves and rising petty crime.
Peso trades near 400 against dollar on the street weakest rateOn record. Prices of staples have been rising steadily, and stores selling imported goods are increasingly demanding hard currency that most Cubans cannot earn. The result is a two-tier economy leading to the dollarization of Venezuela, where access to dollars – not work, skill or effort – determines who eats well and who doesn’t.
Cuba’s specialty crops fared no better. Sugar crop this year is expected to fall below 200,000 tonnes, the lowest ever from the 1800sIn the 1980s, sugar production topped 8 million tonnes. Today, Cuba is importing raw sugar, a stunning reversal for the former agricultural superpower. The collapse destroyed exports, weakened the peso and left thousands of rural workers unemployed.
The losses are not just financial. Over the past four years, approximately 2 million Cubans –about 20 percentMost of the island’s population has fled. Hospitals are short of doctors, universities are short of professors, and small businesses are short of skilled workers. Families are torn apart, classrooms are empty, innovation is halted. What appears to be a pressure valve for governance is actually the slow bleeding of the lifeblood of the nation.
The parallels with Venezuela are unmistakable. Both regimes chose political control over prosperity. Both depended on external lifelines – oil, loans, remittances – which are now drying up. Both crush dissent when policy fails. Venezuela’s collapse left a once-prosperous state hollow. Cuba has the same script, only with a much bigger arch and without the oil money.
The Havana-Caracas partnership has always been more than transactional. For a quarter century, both governments have portrayed themselves as revolutionary brothers challenging American power. bond date is earlierThe rise of Hugo Chávez in 1999and his admiration for Fidel Castro’s revolution four decades earlier. Cuba sent doctors, teachers, and security advisers; Venezuela paid in oil. Even today, as both regimes are flailing, each remains the other’s last trusted ally in a region that has largely progressed.
However, their bond is finally breaking. Venezuelan oil shipments to Cubahave collapsedFrom about 56,000 barrels per day in 2023 to 8,000 barrels in June 2025. Havana still provides diplomatic cover for Maduro, but the two governments are now supporting each other with diminishing strength – two tired revolutions clinging to the same fading ideology.
In both countries, force has replaced persuasion. Independent journalists are jailed, critics are harassed, and citizens express their frustrations privately. Social programs that once stood proud – universal education and health care – have been destroyed and are now mere hollows of what they once were. All that is left are schools without teachers, hospitals without medicines, clinics without electricity.
Meanwhile, Washington is again engaged in a high-risk game in the Caribbean.American warshipVenezuela patrolled and destroyed ships suspected of drug trafficking – a show of force meant to put pressure on Maduro.
Cuban dissident and former political prisoner Oscar Bisset views the regime as interconnected. “Cuba and Venezuela are twin dictatorships that sustain each other through corruption and international crime,” he told me. “The communist Castro regime effectively takes over Venezuela’s political and military institutions and uses them to export repression and smuggle drugs into the United States.”
Formally, President Miguel Diaz-Canel leads Cuba. In fact, decisions still come from a small cadre of aging revolutionaries – Raul Castro, now 93, and a few older comrades in their nineties. Power moves through personal networks rather than institutions. Preservation, not renewal, is the guiding rule. Across the island, billboards are still trumpeting “Continuity.” For most Cubans, this no longer means stability – it means constant suffocation.
Of course, Cuba is not Venezuela. Its security forces remain disciplined. Tourism and remittances still bring in dollars that Caracas can only envy. Migration prevents anger from boiling over. And the Communist Party has survived so many shocks that it is always risky to predict its collapse.
But it’s not hard to see the warning signs. The lights keep flickering. The peso buys less every day.sugar mills are quietThe youth are leaving. The pillars that once held Cuban socialism upright are collapsing all at once.
Venezuela’s collapse grabs the headlines, but Cuba’s slow breakup may have even darker consequences. A failed state just 90 miles from Florida would spark new migration waves, inviting rival powers to the region and testing America’s resolve. Havana’s flickering lights could be the hemisphere’s next alarm bell.
Daniel Allott is the former opinion editor of The Hill and author of “On the road in Trump’s America: A journey into the heart of a divided country,
