Air travel — one of the few systems connecting Cuba directly to global commerce and tourism — begins to fracture.
Responsibility for that fracture is sharply disputed. U.S. officials deny that sanctions pressure is responsible for humanitarian conditions. State Department official Jeremy Lewin described that claim as “simply not true,” pointing to humanitarian aid including staple foods and solar lamps.² Cuban officials, along with foreign governments and members of the U.S. Congress, argue that policies built around restricting fuel shipments often shift their earliest burdens onto civilians.²
Energy analyst Jorge Piñón, who tracks Cuban oil shipments, has offered a rough timeline for the crisis. He believes fuel reserves could run out within months and warns that the island could face the largest blackout in its modern history.² Then he asks the question that frequently surfaces when sanctions begin reshaping daily life: “And now what?”
History offers examples of how energy restrictions interact with fragile infrastructure.
After the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq faced both widespread infrastructure destruction and comprehensive international sanctions. A United Nations humanitarian mission led by Martti Ahtisaari reported that Iraq’s electrical grid and water-treatment systems had been severely damaged, raising concerns about cascading public-health risks.⁸ Subsequent humanitarian assessments documented measurable deterioration in public services. UNICEF estimated that by the late 1990s child mortality in Iraq had risen sharply compared with pre-sanctions levels, while water-treatment capacity declined because imported chemicals and spare parts became scarce.⁹ Scholars continue to debate the precise scale and causes of excess mortality, but there is broad agreement that civilian infrastructure and public-health systems deteriorated significantly under the combined pressure of war damage and sanctions.⁹
The comparison is not meant to equate Cuba with Iraq. Cuba has not experienced wartime infrastructure destruction, and its political and social conditions differ sharply. The comparison highlights a narrower pattern: when fuel, electricity, and imported industrial inputs become instruments of geopolitical pressure, essential public systems often weaken in predictable structural ways even when political outcomes remain uncertain.
Sanctions rarely produce immediate political resolution. More often, they alter the conditions under which ordinary survival decisions must be made.
In Havana, those decisions unfold quietly. They appear in missed buses and nights spent waiting for transportation that never arrives. They surface in suspended jobs, rising food prices, and taxi drivers calculating whether a blackout will erase a day’s earnings. Universities shorten academic calendars. Airlines reconsider whether flights can operate safely at all.
The policy debate will continue in Washington, Mexico City, and Havana. But its consequences are already unfolding in the routines people rely on to keep daily life moving. For Solanda Oña, the crisis has narrowed to a question that is both ordinary and profound: whether there will still be a reliable way home.