Cuba’s newest nationwide blackout has amplified U.S. pressure on the island’s communist government, with President Donald Trump saying the United States will take action “very soon” as the power outage exposes how fragile Cuba’s electricity system has become.
Trump pledged “imminent” action during remarks Tuesday, saying that “Cuba right now is in very bad shape” and adding, “And we’ll be doing something with Cuba very soon.” The remarks followed a U.S. shift that also targeted Cuba indirectly through Venezuela: a day earlier, Trump announced sanctions on Venezuela that included a halt to oil exports vital to Cuba. In the U.S. view, Cuba is now a next step in an effort to expand U.S. influence, the administration has indicated.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed that framing, saying the island “has an economy that doesn’t work in a political and governmental system. They can’t fix it.” Rubio’s comments came as electricity was slowly being restored to some hospitals and homes, while Cuban officials warned the aging power network could fail again.
Behind the rhetoric, Trump’s administration has also been negotiating with Cuba, according to a U.S. official and a source familiar with talks between Washington and Havana. The reporting said the administration is looking for President Miguel Díaz-Canel to leave, though no details were offered on who the administration might want to replace him.
Experts said the limited information leaving Havana and Washington has made it difficult to identify a clear end game. Michael Bustamante, a Cuba expert and associate professor of history at the University of Miami, said, “Some pieces of this story as they’re trickling out, don’t add up to me,” adding, “I can’t quite figure out what the end game is here for either side.”
Rubio and Trump have tied their demands to a broader pressure campaign. The administration has demanded that Cuba release political prisoners and move toward political and economic liberalization in return for lifting sanctions, and Trump has raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba.”
The blackout’s impact is already being described at the household level, according to accounts from Havana residents struggling with outages that make it hard to preserve food or complete daily tasks. Pedro Rámos, a 75-year-old retired mechanic in Old Havana, described trying to boil chicken to save it from spoiling, saying, “I want to see if we can rescue some food,” while also warning, “This is terrible.” Another resident, 48-year-old Dalba Obiedo, said the power outages affected her health after she fell down a staircase when the lights went out, leading to surgery on her jaw.
Cuban officials blamed the latest crisis on what they described as a U.S. energy blockade, pointing to Trump’s January warning about tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba. Cuba’s Ministry of Energy and Mines said on X that the island had restored the electrical system in the western town of Pinar del Rio and in the southeastern province of Holguin, and that some “microsystems” were beginning to operate in various territories. State-owned media reported that by late Monday, power had been restored to 5% of residents in Havana, representing some 42,000 customers.
Without electricity, daily life in Cuba has grown more difficult, with residents describing food spoilage and persistent disruptions to basic services even as restoration begins. As the country continues working to restart parts of the grid, officials cautioned the power network could break down again.
Meanwhile, observers said the U.S. statements about Cuba—coming after the administration’s raid that captured Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and after launches of U.S. military strikes against Iran—have shifted how quickly Washington may be moving beyond sanctions and toward political change. As earlier reporting has shown, the blackout is arriving in the middle of an already deepening energy crisis on the island—an environment in which U.S. officials are now signaling far more than technical pressure MSI previously reported.