Some catastrophes arrive like explosions; others arrive like a hand on the throat that tightens, loosens just enough to keep the victim conscious, then tightens again. What is happening to Cuba now is the second kind. It is less a “crisis” than the logical endpoint of a relationship Ada Ferrer, in Cuba: An American History, describes as “intimate, explosive, and always uneven”—a history in which the United States could never decide whether Cuba was a neighbor, a colony, or a mirror it couldn’t bear to look into.​

If the Iran war exposes how vulnerable the global system is at its maritime choke points, Cuba reveals something just as important: how an empire behaves when the choke point is not a strait half a world away but an island ninety miles off its own shore. It turns out that the methods are the same—sanctions, blockades, energy as weapon—but the blowback is closer, the hypocrisy starker, and the margin for error smaller.

Cuba’s Fuel Blockade Future

The outlines are simple and brutal. A small, import‑dependent island is strangled of fuel. Power plants shut down or limp along on residual stocks. Blackouts spread—at first rolling, then unpredictable, then so widespread that, for stretches, two‑thirds of the country sits in the dark. Refrigerators warm. Buses disappear. Flights are cancelled. Pumps stop pushing clean water uphill. Food that once moved by truck begins to rot in place. UN officials now warn that tens of thousands of cancer patients are missing treatment, nearly a million people are losing piped water when generators stop, and even humanitarian aid is stuck in port because trucks have no diesel.

None of this is an accident. It is the direct consequence of a policy crafted in Washington and justified, as Ferrer might put it, in the same register that once dressed the Platt Amendment as “protection” and the Bay of Pigs as “liberation.” The embargo that has shadowed Cuba since 1960 has been tightened again and again, but the latest turn of the screw is qualitatively different. It targets the literal fuel lines of the society—shipments of oil from Venezuela, Mexico, and any other state bullied or bribed into compliance—on the explicit theory that enough darkness and scarcity will crack the Cuban government before it cracks the Cuban people.​

If you cared only about overthrowing a regime on a strategist’s whiteboard, you might call this efficient. If you cared about the texture of ordinary life, you would see something closer to slow‑motion warfare: a weaponization of kilowatts and kilometers that treats 11 million people as leverage.

Cuba as American Project

Ferrer’s book is built around a simple but devastating premise: to write the history of Cuba is to write a history of the United States from a different angle. The island has been central to American fantasies and fears since before there was a U.S. flag to fly over it. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of extending his “empire for liberty” across Florida into Cuba. John Quincy Adams compared the island to an apple that nature itself destined to fall into the Union’s hands. Southern planters saw in its sugar fields a chance to expand slavery’s domain.​

Long before 1898, U.S. merchants and shipowners had already plugged Cuba into a transatlantic machine: American hulls carried enslaved Africans to its plantations, American capital financed its mills, and American markets swallowed its sugar. Spain still flew its flag from Havana’s forts, but as Ferrer shows, the island’s economy and future were already wired to the north.​

When Cuban separatists finally rose in earnest against Spain in the late nineteenth century, they did so with a vision that would have horrified both Madrid and Washington: a multiracial republic, formally independent, with neither a king nor a plantation oligarchy at the top. The United States entered that war late, reframed it on its own terms as the Spanish‑American War, and claimed the victory. Spanish flags came down on January 1, 1899, but the flag raised in their place was not the lone‑starred Cuban banner that patriots had died for. It was the Stars and Stripes.​

Independence did not arrive; it was deferred and rebranded. Through the Platt Amendment, Washington claimed the right to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it saw fit and carved out Guantánamo as a permanent military foothold. American sugar companies and banks flooded in. By the 1920s, vast stretches of cane, rail, and mill lay in U.S. hands; Havana was reshaped to serve tourists and investors, and the countryside was reorganized around seasonal labor, debt, and the volatility of a single export.​

Ferrer is careful not to turn this into a cartoon of passive victims and omnipotent puppeteers. Cuban elites collaborated. Cuban workers, farmers, and radicals resisted. Coups, “authentic” republics, and reformist waves all came and went. But the through‑line is unmistakable: for more than a century, the United States treated Cuba as a project—a place to discipline, develop, entertain, and extract from—not as a sovereign equal.​

The Revolution and the Broken Mirror

The 1959 revolution shattered that arrangement but did not end the entanglement. It reversed the direction of power, even though physical proximity remained, and wealthy U.S. properties were nationalized. The Eagle vanished from monuments. Havana turned from client to antagonist almost overnight. For Washington, a socialist Cuba so close to Florida was not just a security problem; it was an insult, a refusal to accept the gravity that Adams once invoked.​

The Castro government, for its part, turned the island into a laboratory for post‑colonial development: literacy campaigns, agrarian reform, universal health care, an attempt—uneven, often harsh—to redistribute the fruits of modernity to people who had spent centuries picking cane for others. It did all this under permanent siege by its northern neighbor: invasion, assassination attempts, embargo, covert operations, and the constant threat of annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.​

Ferrer’s point is not that the revolution was pure or painless. It wasn’t. But she insists that you cannot understand it, or its aftermath, without setting it against the long backdrop of occupation, sugar dependency, and thwarted independence. What happens when a people who have been alternately courted and trampled by an empire try to write a different script? Cuba is one answer.​

What happens when the empire can’t forgive them for it, even sixty‑plus years on? That answer is being written right now in the darkened streets of Havana.

Energy as Empire’s Last Language

In my Iran essays, the heart of the argument was that a civilization without slack—without spare capacity in its energy systems, soils, finance, or politics—turns every local war into a test of the whole. Cuba shows the same logic at a smaller scale. The island is almost as dependent on imported fuel as a modern industrial country, but without the buffers: no vast domestic fields, no monetary hegemony, no deep capital markets to soak up shocks.

When Washington cuts off oil, it is not just pinching a budget line. It is severing the arteries that keep water moving, food chilled, buses running, and hospitals lit. Blackouts in a wealthy northern city are temporary inconveniences; blackouts in a poor, sanctioned island are existential crises. They turn vaccines into spoiled cargo, surgeries into gambles, and everyday life into a sequence of improvisations around darkness.

There is a grim symmetry here. The United States, which once organized the island’s economy around sugar and steam, now organizes its suffering around kilowatts and barrels. The levers have changed, but the principle has not: control the flows, and you control the future.​​

But the future no longer has room for such games. In a climate‑stressed, energy‑tight world, weaponizing fuel against an island is not clean geopolitics; it is a rehearsal for broader breakdown. Each tanker turned away from Havana is also a signal to every other vulnerable state about the risks of reliance, and to every other major power about the necessity of finding routes and currencies beyond Washington’s reach.

Blowback, Visible and Invisible

The most obvious blowback is migration. Cuba has already sent waves of exiles and migrants northward in every decade since the revolution, each crest driven by some mix of repression, economic crisis, and U.S. policy. A deliberate fuel strangulation all but guarantees new attempts by sea and land. The same politicians who demand “toughness” toward Havana will soon be standing in front of cameras insisting the border cannot cope with the human fallout of their own strategy.​

Then there is legitimacy. Even in a world hardened by Gaza, Yemen, and Iraq, there is something especially naked about starving an entire country of fuel. It is the kind of act that international law was supposed to name and prevent. The UN is already warning in those exact terms: of “possible humanitarian collapse,” of hospitals forced to triage care by generator hours, of aid convoys immobilized because they cannot get diesel. Each blackout in Havana is also another crack in the already fragile story of a “rules‑based order” administered from Washington. If sanctions are the empire’s favorite “non‑violent” tool, it’s because the dying happens offshore, off‑camera, and far from the people signing the orders.

Finally, there is the subtler blowback Ferrer hints at when she describes how Cubans came to see 1898 not as liberation but as theft. Memory accumulates. A people who have lived through slavery, sugar dependency, occupations, revolution, and embargo are not blank slates. They carry stories about who starved them and who stood by. Every night spent in darkness because someone in an office in Washington signed an order will become another story added to that ledger.​

Cuba as Microcosm of Collapse

Seen from a distance, the new Cuban crisis might look like a small, if tragic, side plot in a world preoccupied with larger wars. Seen from closer in, it is a concentrated version of the same themes:

• A global system that cannot deliver basic security and dignity without continuous extraction and coercion.

• An empire that reaches for the same blunt tools—blockades, sanctions, proxy pressure—even as those tools corrode the order they are meant to defend.

• A planet whose physical limits—of energy, climate, and ecology—turn every act of economic warfare into a ripple in a tightly coupled web.

Cuba has been, for centuries, a place where big forces show their hand early: slavery, monoculture, corporate imperialism, Cold War proxy conflict, the false promise of “development” under dependency. It is not surprising that it is now an early stage for energy warfare in the age of climate breakdown.​

In that sense, the streets of Havana today belong in the same mental frame as tankers stalled near Hormuz or farmers in the Midwest staring at fertilizer quotes. The details differ; the structure doesn’t. A civilization that has built its comforts on other people’s precarity is discovering that the line between “over there” and “here” is dissolving.

Cuba’s blackout is not separate from the slow collapse I have been mapping. It is one more facet of the same weather system: a world in which the engines of empire still turn, but with less fuel, less consent, and less time.