For months, President Trump has been predicting that Cuba is about to collapse.
“It’s just going to fall,” he told reporters on Jan. 4, a day after taking control of Venezuela’s oil, which had been Cuba’s lifeline.
He then imposed an oil blockade that has pushed the island into its worst ever energy crisis, with mass blackouts now lasting nearly all day. And yet, more than six months later, the Cuban government and people are still standing.
This month, we visited the country to understand how. After a week on the ground, we found that while Cubans are clearly suffering, they are also doing what perhaps they do best: adapting.
They are swapping their gas-guzzling 1950s American cars for electric motorcycles and rickshaws from China; importing hefty lithium batteries to keep televisions and fans running through blackouts; jury-rigging generators to run on more accessible natural gas; and installing solar panels on rooftops and even vehicles.
Together, the workarounds amount to a new Cuban energy grid — this one more in the hands of the Cuban people, propping up society with the electricity off and fuel lines dry.
These solutions have enabled the Cuban government to ration power by turning on the lights for just a few hours a day, stretching out whatever scarce fuel it has left in an effort to withstand Washington’s intense pressure campaign.
The result is that Cuba has lasted far longer without fuel shipments than the Trump administration appears to have expected.
Over nearly seven decades of U.S. pressure, Cuba has defied the odds and improvised to survive. Now it seems that Mr. Trump, like many U.S. presidents before him, is also finding that toppling the government founded by Fidel Castro is not so simple.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters last week that the Trump administration still wants to see the Cuban government fall. “We’re prepared to be very realistic about how you do that, and patient,” he said. “These are complex things that take time, and obviously we’re prepared to do what we can.”
The Cuban government is seeking a deal. “Cuba is not an enemy of the United States,” Carlos Fernández de Cossio, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, said in an interview. “What we would like is a constructive and respectful relationship.”
Meantime, the Cuban people, as they have for decades, are making do. “Cubans thrive amid crisis,” said Humberto Palmero, a 55-year-old farmer, standing on the hill where he grew up along Cuba’s coastline, with a view toward Florida. His siblings had already left for Miami and his two children are fleeing to Spain, but he said he is determined to stay.
After hearing about the oil blockade, Mr. Palmero learned on YouTube how to distill junk plastic into homemade gasoline and diesel. He has since built a tiny, makeshift refinery in his backyard to power his motorcycle and light his stove.
“We look for solutions,” he said. “The economic restrictions are slowly killing us, but we’re pulling through with all our might, managing to get by until we see what happens next.”
Misery and Grit
In Havana and beyond, the crisis’s effects were clear.
We met families walking two hours for water because government pumps had run out of diesel. Women, lacking cooking gas, burned firewood on the street. Powerless refrigerators became cabinets. Hitchhikers littered roadsides after the city halted public busing. And dozens of people told us they were simply exhausted after so many sleepless nights in the sweltering heat without fans or air-conditioning.
But we also saw a country that was still functioning.
Vehicles were on the road — despite black-market gasoline reaching $30 a gallon — because many were electric. Restaurants were open for the few who could afford them, powered by rumbling generators out back. Hospitals, government buildings and the airport had power because they were on protected parts of the grid. Medical clinics, nursing homes and bank branches ran off solar panels donated by China.
Cell service was sometimes working. Televisions showing the World Cup were not hard to find. And even roadside stands were serving cold beer from refrigerators powered by the sun.
But the makeshift energy grid also exposed Cuba’s inequality.
The batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles overwhelmingly belong to wealthier Cubans, which usually means those with relatives abroad. Their poorer neighbors often live without power and scrape by with meager pay amid rising inflation.
“The situation here is fine, because the owner can afford to buy solar panels,” said Yeny Oliva, 26, a bartender at a roadside restaurant. “But for us, at home, life is awful.” On wages of roughly $1 a day, she said, she struggles to buy milk for her 3-year-old daughter, and then their food spoils quickly without electricity.
Yet she also was grateful for the solar energy. Without power, the restaurant had closed. Then, the owners installed the panels and she was back at work.
While not everyone can afford alternative power sources, their energy has trickled down. Electric rickshaws ferry people to work. Solar panels have kept stores open. And people charge their phones and lanterns off their neighbor’s battery or the generator at work.
In one neighborhood, we saw one of the few families with a generator set up a television in the street so children could watch cartoons.
“We have not reached the point of having a humanitarian crisis precisely because of the strength of our society,” Mr. Fernández de Cossio, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, said in Havana’s Fidel Castro museum, where the lights were on but the air-conditioning had failed. “The intimate expectation in political circles in the United States was that Cuba could not survive beyond April. And here we are.”
Scraping the Barrel
Other than a single Russian oil tanker in March, allies have not been willing to test Washington’s effective oil blockade.
As a result, Cuba has been powering its electric grid solely with domestic oil and gas and a growing network of solar parks sponsored by China. Together, they are enough to support roughly half of Cuban demand, according to Jorge Piñón, who studies Cuban energy at the University of Texas.
To preserve that supply, the government strategically cuts power at certain times and in certain places. It also runs plants at lower capacity to keep them from failing; extracts more natural gas; and even tries to refine sludgy oil residues from the bottom of years-old tanks.
“They are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Mr. Piñón said.
Mr. Piñón said he and other analysts underestimated the Cuban government’s resourcefulness when they forecast it would exhaust its fuel stocks by March. But now he is skeptical of the government’s claim in May that the island has run out of fuel. On our trip, it was clear gasoline and diesel were still circulating.
At least some is coming from the United States. The Trump administration has allowed limited fuel exports to private businesses in Cuba, which has relieved pressure on black-market gas prices. And last week, the U.S. government’s first batch of $100 million in aid arrived.
The moves show how the Trump administration is exerting power over Cuba, ordering other nations to halt fuel shipments but allowing its own, and then providing aid in response to the resulting crisis. A White House spokeswoman said the Trump administration viewed Cuba as a threat to national security.
Exhausted Cubans told us they were angry at both Havana and Washington. Yet no one said they planned to take to the streets. Aside from banging pots and pans, the Cuban people have hardly staged protests.
“You go out to express your opinion on the street, and they throw you in jail or fine you,” said David Hechavarría Gamboa, 24, standing alongside his wife on a darkened street. “I can’t put my family at risk.”
Chasing Daylight
When U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January, Nelson Vega knew Cuba had a problem. Venezuelan oil had powered Cuba for years.
A month later, Mr. Vega, a 38-year-old entrepreneur, borrowed money from relatives in Florida to buy a Chinese-made electric rickshaw for $4,850. It took 10 hours to charge, and almost immediately, the blackouts made that difficult. So he invested a further $600 to drill solar panels to its roof.
Now he can power the entire battery by parking it in the sun for a day. “To me, this is the future,” he said. “We’re going to overcome the U.S. blockade.”
Once we traveled outside Havana, solar panels proliferated. Cuba’s power grid has been decaying in rural areas for years, making blackouts — and solar panels — already common.
On the road west, we met Abel Menéndez on a roof blanketed in panels. He has been selling and installing solar kits for five years, he said, but now both supply and demand have skyrocketed. At the same time, costs have dropped, to about $400 a panel from $500 a year earlier. “People are constantly calling,” he said.
We also came across a new field of panels — one of the government’s 54 solar parks, most inaugurated since 2025 and all built with China’s help.
Few countries are adopting solar faster than Cuba. Solar energy can now meet roughly 10 percent of Cuba’s electricity needs, the government says, up from 3 percent at the start of 2025. Cuban officials aim to depend fully on renewable energy by 2050.
For now, solar provides a boost, but it hardly solves Cuba’s problem. The island lacks the massive batteries needed to store solar power. That means it can provide roughly 20 percent of Cuba’s electricity at midday, but virtually none after the sun sets, during peak demand.
Running on Fumes
Perhaps Cuba’s hottest product of the moment are portable lithium batteries that can be charged in a few hours and then temporarily power televisions, fans or even refrigerators.
The most popular model costs about $750 in Cuba, sold on social media by Cubans who have imported them from China. That is more than most Cubans make in a year, so most of the batteries are sponsored by relatives abroad.
Other Cubans are electrifying their homes with the gas piped in for cooking and heating water. About 280,000 residences in Havana have such gas lines, and many are connecting them to modified generators designed to run on liquid fuel. Cuba produces the gas domestically, so it is one of the few energy sources not affected by the blockade.
The gas is also cheap, especially for the 120,000 households that pay a flat rate regardless of use. One man said he had been running a generator off gas almost nonstop, and yet was still billed the same 50 pesos, or eight cents, for the month.
On one of our final nights in Havana, we found a bar still full of patrons past midnight, powering its string lights and Latin music with a natural gas generator. Outside, we met Kiké Rodríguez, 37, founder of a Cuban barbecue business, Manteca, that has expanded during the crisis. He now employs 18 people to cook and deliver pork and plantains to customers across Havana.
“We’re the masters of this,” he said. “We’ve been figuring things out our whole lives.”
He pointed to the rooftop, where he said he was finishing a remodel to open his first brick-and-mortar restaurant, powered by the same generator.
“How are things going to play out? Nobody knows,” he added. “But when people say the country is going to fall apart, I don’t exactly know what they mean.”
Diana Karla Hernández and Dariel Pradas contributed reporting. Yasu Tsuji contributed video editing and production.
