By: Staff Writer
March 24, 2026
The Cuban Revolution may be at its end as the Donald Trump administration mounts more pressure on the island nation amid a lingering fuel crisis that has crippled the country.
Cuba, now starved for oil, has been facing nationwide blackouts over the past several weeks since the fall of its regional ally, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela at the hands of the Trump administration.
Venezuela supplied Cuba with oil to run its economy, but as the communist country is effectively blocked from Venezuelan oil due to Maduro being taken into US custody and the US assuming control over the international trade of the country, oil shipments to Cuba has ceased.
Cuba has been plunged into darkness for the second time in less than a week after its national power network failed again, strained by an energy blockade imposed by the United States.
The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, announced a total blackout across the island on Saturday without initially giving a cause for the outage.
The union later said the blackout was caused by an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camaguey province.
“From that moment, a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online,” said a report from the Energy Ministry, which activated “micro-islands” of generating units to provide power to vital centres, hospitals and water systems.
United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Cuba “has to get new people in charge,” and the administration of US President Donald Trump continues to heap pressure on the island nation.
Rubio made the comment on Tuesday during an Oval Office event, saying Cuba “has an economy that doesn’t work in a political and governmental system”.
Located some 150 kilometers (around 93 miles) away from the southern US state of Florida, Cuba has been a thorn in the side of the United States since the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro. His communist regime consistently opposed the US, which had once had significant influence over the island, and during the Cold War was considered a bridgehead for other communist states such as Russia and China, or countries hostile to the US such as Venezuela.
During his time in office, US President Barack Obama made overtures to Cuba and tried to revive relations with Havana. But these efforts were reversed by Trump during his first term (2017 to 2021) — much to the relief of many Cuban exiles and their descendants, many of whom want the regime to fall. Rubio is one of the most prominent US citizens of Cuban descent. The Cuban diaspora represents an important voting bloc, particularly in the swing state of Florida.