Cuba Is Collapsing Into Humanitarian Chaos — Here’s What Happens Next | Peter Zeihan

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Let me tell you something about Cuba that most people get completely backwards.

[00:00:04]When people in Washington or Brussels or wherever talk about Cuba, they talk about it as if it's a political problem, a diplomatic problem, a question of ideology and sanctions and Cold War leftovers. And yes, fine, all of that is technically true. But what is actually happening on that island right now in 2026 is something much more elemental, much more catastrophic, and frankly much more interesting than any of that framing suggests. What is happening in Cuba right now is a system failure, not an economic downturn, not a political crisis in the traditional sense, a full cascading multi-sector system failure.

[00:00:44]And once you understand the geography and the demographics and the energy picture all at the same time, once you put those three lenses on simultaneously, Cuba stops looking like a political problem and starts looking like what it actually is, a country that is running out of time. So, let's back up and do this properly because if we're going to understand where Cuba is today, we have to understand where Cuba has always been. And Cuba has always been in a difficult geography for independence. I know that sounds strange because island equals security, right? Islands are defensible. Islands have maritime buffers. And that's true to a point. But here's what's also true. Islands are dependent. Islands cannot feed themselves at scale without a lot of infrastructure. Islands cannot fuel themselves without imports. Islands cannot industrialize without supply chains that run through the sea. And Cuba, specifically, sits 90 miles off the coast of the most powerful country in the history of the world. That proximity has defined every single thing about Cuba's modern existence, and not in a good way. When Fidel Castro took power in 1959, he nationalized US-owned properties, particularly in the oil sector, and the United States responded with what became a comprehensive economic embargo that has now lasted over six decades.

[00:02:06]Six decades. Think about what that means structurally. For over 60 years, Cuba has been denied normal access to global markets.

[00:02:16]It cannot freely import medicines, spare parts, machinery, agricultural inputs, or technology.

[00:02:22]It cannot borrow from Western financial institutions. It cannot attract foreign investment at anything close to a normal rate.

[00:02:30]Everything Cuba gets from the outside world is filtered through a geopolitical lens, either by the United States blocking it or by other actors, the Soviets, the Venezuelans, deciding to subsidize it for their own strategic purposes.

[00:02:45]Cuba has never, in its entire post-revolutionary history, been a normal economy. It has always been a client state, propped up by whoever happened to need a thorn in Washington's side. And when that patron disappears or weakens, Cuba bleeds. That is exactly what happened at the end of the Cold War. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba lost its sugar daddy almost overnight. The Soviets had been subsidizing Cuban oil imports, buying Cuban sugar at above market prices, providing technical assistance, sending military hardware, the whole package.

[00:03:21]When that evaporated, Cuba entered what Castro himself called the special period in time of peace, which was a remarkable piece of euphemistic branding for what was, in fact, a famine.

[00:03:33]Cubans lost weight, hunger became widespread, agricultural output cratered, the economy contracted by somewhere between 35 and 50% in just a few years. The country survived, barely, by essentially going back to subsistence level agriculture, and by cutting consumption to the bone. it was devastating. And it was a preview, a grim, instructive preview of exactly what happens when Cuba's external patron disappears. Now, fast forward about a decade and enter Hugo Chávez. Venezuela discovers it has enormous oil reserves.

[00:04:09]Chávez wants to be the new anti-American champion of the hemisphere, and Cuba is the obvious partner.

[00:04:16]So, Venezuela starts shipping oil to Cuba cheaply, generously, on preferential terms. And in exchange, Cuba sends doctors and intelligence operatives and various other services to prop up the Venezuelan revolution.

[00:04:31]It was a transactional relationship dressed up in the language of socialist solidarity, and it worked for a while.

[00:04:39]At peak, Venezuela was sending Cuba something like 100,000 barrels of oil per day.

[00:04:44]That is a lot of oil for an island of 11 million people.

[00:04:49]That oil kept the lights on, kept the buses running, kept the hospitals partially functional.

[00:04:54]Venezuela was, in a very literal sense, the life support system for the Cuban state.

[00:05:00]But here's the thing about Venezuela.

[00:05:02]Venezuela is its own catastrophe in slow motion. Chavismo's economic mismanagement destroyed the country's oil sector. Production collapsed from roughly 3 million barrels per day at peak to less than 700,000 barrels per day by the late 2010s and early 2020s.

[00:05:20]Venezuela couldn't even keep its own country running, let alone subsidize Cuba.

[00:05:25]So, Cuban oil imports from Venezuela started declining from that 100,000 barrels per day peak down to something closer to 40,000, then lower.

[00:05:35]Cuba had to find other suppliers. Mexico stepped in and became a significant supplier, covering at various points roughly 44% of Cuba's total oil imports.

[00:05:46]Russia chipped in occasionally, Algeria sent some, but the volumes were never sufficient and the payments were always complicated and the whole arrangement was fragile in ways that any honest analyst could see.

[00:05:59]And then 2024 happened and then 2025 and then January 2026.

[00:06:06]Let me give you the technical picture of Cuba's electrical grid because it matters enormously. Cuba's grid has a total installed generation capacity of roughly 3,000 megawatts.

[00:06:17]Even in good times, the effective output barely hit 2,000 megawatts against maximum demand of 3,000 to 3,500 megawatts. That means Cuba, even before the current crisis, was structurally short on power. The plants are old, most of them date to the Soviet era. They have not been adequately maintained because Cuba doesn't have the hard currency to buy spare parts and the spare parts it might get are restricted under the US embargo.

[00:06:45]By early 2026, eight of Cuba's major power plants were completely offline due to breakdowns and fuel shortages. The ones that remained operational were running at an average of just 34% of their rated capacity. A March 2026 report by the Cuba Study Group estimated that closing the generation gap alone would require at least 6.6 billion dollars in new investment. And that doesn't count modernizing the transmission and distribution infrastructure, which could push the total to eight to 10 billion dollars.

[00:07:18]Cuba doesn't have eight to 10 billion dollars. Cuba doesn't have 800 million dollars. Cuba is broke.

[00:07:27]The blackouts started in earnest in 2024.

[00:07:30]February 2024, March 2024, October 2024.

[00:07:36]That October blackout was triggered by the failure of the Antonio Guiteras power plant, which is Cuba's largest, and it knocked out power across the entire island. The entire island, not a region. The entire country went dark.

[00:07:52]It was the most severe living crisis Cuba had experienced since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

[00:07:58]Then December 2024.

[00:08:01]Then March 2025.

[00:08:03]Then September 2025 again and into late 2025.

[00:08:09]And in March 2026, another complete collapse.

[00:08:13]As of May 2026, we are looking at blackouts that no longer cycle predictably. In many areas of Cuba, electricity has essentially disappeared as a reliable service.

[00:08:24]Before the current oil blockade, power cuts lasted roughly 12 to 14 hours a day, which is already catastrophic. Now they can run more than 20 hours. We're not talking about inconvenience. We're talking about civilizational stress.

[00:08:40]Then came the Trump administration's moves in January 2026.

[00:08:45]The US captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and forced the Venezuelan government to stop sending oil to Cuba.

[00:08:53]Venezuela had been providing roughly 20% of Cuba's total energy imports, gone immediately.

[00:09:00]Then Washington moved to restrict oil shipments more broadly, leveraging the US Navy's dominance in the Caribbean to tighten the blockade.

[00:09:08]Mexico, which had been Cuba's largest supplier, came under pressure as well.

[00:09:13]Cuba's oil imports fell 35% in just the first 10 months of 2025, even before these January moves.

[00:09:22]And then the floor fell out completely.

[00:09:24]The UN Secretary-General, through his spokesperson Stephane Dujarric, stated bluntly that he was extremely concerned about the humanitarian situation in Cuba, which will worsen and if not collapse if it's oil needs go unmet.

[00:09:39]The UN World Food Program by 2025 was already furnishing 1.5 million Cubans, more than one in 10 people on the island, with direct food assistance. One in 10 people.

[00:09:53]In a country that is not at war.

[00:09:55]In a country that isn't suffering from a drought or a flood or an earthquake.

[00:10:00]This is structural collapse of an economic and energy system and the human cost is already enormous.

[00:10:07]Let's talk about what blackouts actually mean at the ground level. Because when you hear blackout, your brain probably goes to inconvenience.

[00:10:16]You lose your Wi-Fi. Your air conditioning stops. You're annoyed.

[00:10:21]That is not what this is.

[00:10:22]In Cuba, blackouts mean hospitals that struggle to operate. Surgeons working by flashlight.

[00:10:29]Refrigeration for medicines failing.

[00:10:32]Insulin spoiling. Blood banks compromised. Dialysis patients who cannot get treatment. Blackouts mean water pumps stop because water distribution in Cuba depends on electric pumps. So, not only do you lose power, you lose running water.

[00:10:48]Blackouts mean food spoils. In a country already experiencing severe food shortages, the cold chain is everything.

[00:10:57]Refrigeration failures destroy whatever perishable food inventory exists.

[00:11:02]Residents have been cooking communal meals outdoors using wood and charcoal, pooling whatever supplies remain. This is not 2026. This is something more medieval.

[00:11:14]Tourism, one of Cuba's very few remaining sources of hard currency, has been devastated.

[00:11:21]Hotels run on expensive, unreliable generators, if they run at all.

[00:11:26]Why would a tourist fly to Havana if they're going to sit in the dark and sweat?

[00:11:30]The answer is they wouldn't and they don't.

[00:11:34]And without hard currency from tourism, Cuba cannot pay for the imports it desperately needs.

[00:11:40]It's a death spiral. Every failure feeds every other failure. Agriculture is collapsing in parallel. Cuban farmers already faced chronic energy shortages, limited access to fertilizer, limited access to seeds, limited access to machinery, all direct consequences of the embargo and the mismanagement of the state-run agricultural system.

[00:12:02]From 2016 to 2024, production of major crops like corn and rice plunged 38 to 58%.

[00:12:10]58%.

[00:12:13]That's not a bad harvest. That's a sector in freefall. And hurricanes Oscar and Rafael in 2024, followed by hurricane Melissa in 2025, repeatedly damaged critical water infrastructure with barely any interval for recovery.

[00:12:29]1/3 of the population in affected areas lacks safely managed water services.

[00:12:34]Water in the 21st century.

[00:12:37]In a country 90 miles from the richest nation in human history.

[00:12:42]Now, here's where I want to push back on the dominant narrative because most of the coverage of Cuba's crisis falls into one of two traps. The first trap is to blame everything on the US embargo. And yes, the embargo is real. Yes, it has distorted and restricted and punished the Cuban economy for over 60 years.

[00:13:00]The UN General Assembly has voted for over three consecutive decades to call for an end to the embargo. That's not a close vote. That's essentially the entire world outside of the United States, Israel, and a handful of Pacific island nations saying this embargo is wrong. I get it. The embargo has done real damage, but the embargo alone does not explain what has happened to Cuba.

[00:13:24]The embargo has been in place since 1962.

[00:13:27]Cuba survived it, badly, but survived it. What actually broke Cuba was a combination of the embargo plus catastrophic economic mismanagement plus demographic collapse plus overdependence on a series of failing patron states.

[00:13:43]You cannot pin all of this on Washington and feel intellectually honest about it.

[00:13:47]The second trap is to frame this purely as a political problem that can be solved through diplomacy or sanctions relief. And yes, lifting the embargo would help, but lifting the embargo tomorrow does not restore Cuba's generating capacity overnight. It does not rebuild the agricultural sector. It does not reverse 20 years of demographic hemorrhage. These are structural problems that took decades to develop and will take decades to reverse, assuming there is political will, capital, and a functioning state left to do the reversing.

[00:14:17]And that last assumption is increasingly uncertain.

[00:14:21]Let me tell you about the demographics because this is where things get truly dark from a long-term perspective. Cuba is losing its population at a rate that should terrify anyone who cares about the future of the island.

[00:14:32]Since 2021, more than 1 million people have left Cuba. The island's effective population has dropped from roughly 11.3 million to somewhere in the low 10 million range, and that decline is accelerating.

[00:14:46]Every year Cuba loses somewhere between 250,000 and 350,000 inhabitants through the combined effects of emigration and a negative natural balance, meaning more Cubans are dying than are being born.

[00:15:01]If these trends continue, the most conservative projections have Cuba's population dropping to between 6 and 8 million people by 2050 to 2100.

[00:15:11]That is not a demographic challenge.

[00:15:14]That is demographic collapse.

[00:15:16]And think about who is leaving.

[00:15:18]It's not the elderly and the sick. It's the young. It's the educated. It's the doctors, the engineers, the entrepreneurs, the people with the skills and the energy and the ambition to rebuild something.

[00:15:32]It's women of childbearing age, which means the natural population replacement mechanism is being gutted. Cuba is being depleted of exactly the human capital it would need to recover from this crisis.

[00:15:44]Every boat that leaves, every plane that takes off, takes with it another piece of Cuba's future.

[00:15:51]The geographical redistribution of this exodus to Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Uruguay reflects the adaptation of migrants to an increasingly hostile geopolitical environment. These are smart, capable people making rational decisions. The rational decision, if you are a young Cuban with skills and ambition, is to leave, and they are leaving.

[00:16:14]Now, let me put all of this in the geopolitical frame, because that's ultimately where I live.

[00:16:19]What does Cuba's collapse mean for the region? What does it mean for the United States? And what does it mean for the broader global order, to the extent that there still is one?

[00:16:30]For the United States, the Cuban crisis presents a strategic dilemma that the Trump administration has, characteristically, approached with maximalist pressure and minimal consideration of second- and third-order effects. The theory appears to be that if you squeeze Cuba hard enough, cut off Venezuelan oil, pressure Mexico, blockade the island economically, the regime will either make a deal or collapse, and either outcome is acceptable because it removes a hostile government 90 miles from Florida.

[00:17:02]Trump himself told reporters in January 2026 that it doesn't have to be a humanitarian crisis, and that Cuba could come to Washington and make a deal.

[00:17:12]He offered no specifics on what that deal would look like.

[00:17:16]That is not a strategy. That is pressure applied in the hope that something happens. And the problem with applying maximum pressure to a country that is already on the edge of systemic collapse is that you might not get a controlled transition. You might get chaos.

[00:17:31]If the Cuban state loses its ability to provide basic services, food, water, electricity, security, you will get a mass migration event of a scale that makes recent border crises look modest.

[00:17:44]You are talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of people, maybe more, attempting to cross the Florida Straits. You are talking about violence and disorder on the island as competing factions, military units, local power brokers, criminal organizations, fill the vacuum left by a collapsing central government. You are talking about potential humanitarian intervention, which the CSIS Cuba Study Group has noted would be extraordinarily complex, especially if security conditions deteriorate simultaneously.

[00:18:18]And you are talking about this happening 90 miles from the continental United States in an area where the US has significant maritime and military assets, which means Washington gets pulled in whether it wants to be or not.

[00:18:32]The one Russian fuel shipment that arrived in early 2026, which bought Cuba a few weeks of breathing room, is instructive. Russia has neither the will nor the capacity to be Cuba's new patron. Moscow is consumed by Ukraine. Its economy is under sanctions. Its own energy sector is under pressure. Russia can send symbolic gestures, but it cannot replace Venezuela's role.

[00:18:58]China has investments in Cuba and has shown some interest in deepening its presence, but Beijing is not going to write the kind of blank checks that Caracas wrote in the Chavez era.

[00:19:07]China is strategic and patient. It is not going to pour resources into a sinking ship without a very clear return on investment. There is no obvious new patron on the horizon.

[00:19:18]What makes this moment different from previous Cuban crises, the special period of the early 1990s, the various blackout episodes of recent years, is the combination of factors all converging simultaneously.

[00:19:31]In the 1990s, Cuba still had a relatively young and resilient population, a functioning if stressed agricultural sector, and a government that commanded significant political legitimacy from people who had lived through the revolution.

[00:19:46]None of those things are true anymore.

[00:19:48]The population is aging and depleting.

[00:19:50]The agricultural sector is in a structural collapse that predates the energy crisis. The government's legitimacy has eroded through decades of economic failure, and the protests that broke out in 2024, hundreds of people in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba's second-largest city, blocking streets and confronting authorities over blackouts and food shortages, represent a kind of public anger that would have been unthinkable in Castro's era.

[00:20:17]The global response to Cuba's crisis has also revealed a deepening international divide.

[00:20:23]The Chicago Council on Global Affairs framed it well.

[00:20:27]Is limiting access to food and energy an acceptable form of geopolitical leverage, or is there a shared international responsibility for humanitarian intervention?

[00:20:37]This is a question that doesn't have a clean answer, and different actors are coming down on very different sides of it. Much of the global South, already frustrated by what it perceives as Western double standards on humanitarian intervention, is watching how the United States handles Cuba and drawing conclusions about American reliability as a partner and American sincerity on human rights.

[00:21:00]This is not a cost-free policy.

[00:21:02]There's a deeper structural point here that I keep coming back to, one that connects Cuba to broader global trends that I've been writing about for years.

[00:21:11]We are living through the breakdown of the post-World War II globalized order.

[00:21:15]The order in which the United States provided security guarantees and open markets and allowed global supply chains to function freely.

[00:21:24]That order is unwinding.

[00:21:26]And as it unwinds, countries that were structurally dependent on it, countries that could only function because they had access to global trade flows, foreign capital, and external security guarantees, are going to find themselves in serious trouble. Cuba is an extreme case because Cuba was doubly dependent, dependent on global trade flows that the embargo largely blocked, and therefore doubly dependent on whatever patron was willing to subsidize it outside of normal market channels.

[00:21:57]But Cuba is not unique in being vulnerable to the unwinding of the global order. It is just the most dramatic current example.

[00:22:06]The end state here, if nothing changes, is ugly.

[00:22:10]Food production, which has already collapsed by more than a third from 2016 to 2024 levels, faces further deterioration as energy shortages make farming increasingly impossible. No fuel for machinery, no electricity for irrigation pumps, no cold chain for what is harvested.

[00:22:30]Basic services, water, sanitation, health care, are already buckling and each blackout pushes them closer to irreparable failure.

[00:22:40]Population decline accelerates, stripping the country of the human capital needed to maintain even basic infrastructure. The government, unable to provide security and sustenance, faces growing unrest that it may lack the capacity to manage. And at some point, nobody knows exactly when because these things rarely happen on schedule, the whole system tips over.

[00:23:03]There is a scenario where this doesn't end in total collapse. It requires at minimum some restoration of fuel supplies to maintain basic power generation, a negotiated framework that gives Cuba access to enough international capital to begin rebuilding its energy infrastructure, and some form of political liberalization that can stem the demographic hemorrhage by giving young Cubans a reason to stay and invest their futures on the island.

[00:23:29]None of those things are impossible, but none of them are imminent, and all of them require political decisions in Havana and in Washington that there is currently no sign of either government being willing to make. What Trump said about Cuba is actually more honest than most political statements on this topic.

[00:23:47]A deal could be made if both sides wanted one. Cuba has leverage in the sense that its collapse creates problems for the United States. The United States has leverage in the sense that it is the ultimate arbiter of what flows in and out of the Caribbean. A deal is theoretically possible, but deals require counterparties who trust each other enough to make credible commitments, and after 65 years of mutual hostility, that trust does not exist. The Cuban government's instinct, honed over decades, is that any concession to Washington is a step toward regime change. The American government's instinct, particularly in its current political configuration, is that Cuba is a communist holdout that must be broken, not negotiated with.

[00:24:33]These are not positions that readily lend themselves to deal making.

[00:24:37]So, where does this leave us?

[00:24:39]It leaves us watching in real time the collapse of a small island nation that has been trapped for 65 years between its own government's failures and the world's longest-running geopolitical grudge match.

[00:24:53]It leaves us watching a population that has already shrunk by over a million people in 4 years continue to drain away as those who can leave do.

[00:25:03]It leaves us watching an energy system that was already on life support absorb blow after blow until the grid simply cannot recover.

[00:25:12]And it leaves us asking whether the international community, the United Nations, the regional actors, the great powers has the will and the framework to intervene meaningfully before this tips into something truly catastrophic.

[00:25:26]Based on what I've seen so far, I would not bet on it. Cuba's crisis is not ultimately about Cuba. It is about what happens when geography, demography, energy, and geopolitics all converge in the worst possible combination. It is about what happens when a country's political system becomes so rigid that it cannot adapt. And when the external actors with the power to help decide that pressure serves their interests better than assistance. It is about the limits of ideology. Both the Cuban government's socialism and Washington's embargo is policy when confronted with the brute reality of an island running out of fuel, food, water, and people.

[00:26:13]It is a tragedy that was in many ways predictable.

[00:26:17]I said years ago that Cuba was demographically and economically fragile in ways that made it structurally vulnerable to exactly this kind of cascading failure.

[00:26:28]I take no satisfaction in being right about that. None at all.

[00:26:32]What happens next in Cuba will depend on choices. Choices made in Havana and Washington. Choices made in Beijing and Mexico City. Choices made at the United Nations and in the corridors of whatever international institutions still have the credibility and capacity to broker something. I don't know what those choices will be. I rarely predict specific political decisions because political decisions are made by individuals, and individuals are unpredictable.

[00:27:02]What I can tell you is that the underlying forces are not going to get better on their own.

[00:27:08]The demographics are going in the wrong direction. The energy infrastructure is deteriorating faster than it is being repaired. The food system is in structural decline. The hard currency flows needed to reverse any of this are not arriving, and the clock is ticking.

[00:27:26]If you want to understand Cuba, stop thinking about it as a political problem and start thinking about it as a geographic, demographic, and energy problem.

[00:27:36]That's the frame that actually tells you what's happening and why.

[00:27:41]And right now, what's happening is that Cuba is running out of time.

[00:27:45]Whether it runs out of time before someone decides to act, that's the question.

[00:27:50]And honestly, based on the trajectory we're on, I'm not optimistic.