riskier for foreign governments and energy companies to keep Cuba’s power system running.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, quickly illustrated how that pressure can ripple outward. Reuters reported that Sheinbaum said Mexico’s oil shipments to Cuba were “currently halted” while her government searched for ways to provide support without triggering economic retaliation from Washington.⁴ She described the consequences in blunt humanitarian terms: “You cannot strangle a people like this. They don’t have fuel for hospitals, for schools.”²
Policy language tends to stay abstract until it reaches a paycheck and a grocery counter.
Lizzel Jimenez, 64, told The Wall Street Journal she can no longer reliably reach her job at Cuba’s Department of Agriculture. Even if she could, the position — which pays about 4,000 pesos per month — has been frozen indefinitely. “Everything is paralyzed,” she said. “Almost all the jobs are paralyzed.”²
Jimenez is raising her four-year-old granddaughter. She said a liter of milk costs about 1,600 pesos and a small package of chicken drumsticks costs around 2,000. Those two items alone place significant strain on her monthly income and illustrate how quickly energy shortages translate into household economic pressure.²
Reuters reporting adds more faces to the improvisation now shaping daily life. A Havana resident named Jesus Sosa said people once used a mobile app to reserve monthly fuel purchases using local currency. “Not anymore,” he said. “Sales in national currency have stopped.”⁵ A 22-year-old taxi dispatcher, Daylan Perez, described transportation choices in simple economic terms: “You have to pay the price or stay home.”⁵ Another driver, Alexander Leyet, tried to adapt by switching to an electric three-wheeled taxi but now struggles to charge it during power outages. “Because of the blackouts I can only charge my taxi for four or five hours,” he said.⁵
None of this resembles sudden collapse. It resembles a gradual decline in reliability. Fuel shortages disrupt transportation and refrigeration, while substitute systems — electric vehicles, digital scheduling, food storage — depend on electricity generated from the same shrinking fuel supply. Residents describe daily routines becoming harder to plan. Work hours drift. Commutes stretch unpredictably. Food preservation becomes uncertain. Reuters interviews show Havana, long somewhat shielded from the worst infrastructure failures experienced in rural provinces, now absorbing longer blackouts and rising transportation costs as the energy squeeze spreads.⁵
As reliability declines, cities often experience strain not simply through discomfort but through the loss of predictability that allows daily life to function.
Spanish-language reporting shows how institutions begin adjusting once that predictability disappears. After President Miguel Díaz-Canel addressed the nation, the University of Havana announced contingency measures, including sharply reduced in-person classes and academic events. A psychology student told El País, “This feels apocalyptic.”⁶