Cubans rendered powerless as outages persist and tensions with US escalate

https://apnews.com/article/cuba-us-oil-power-outages-electricity-trump-ccab32796f7b57353adedc380181c68f

40•petethomas•2h ago

Comments

goda90•1h ago

This really illustrates how important it is to switch to renewable energy. I know it's not an easy task for impoverished communities to get the startup capital to install solar+batteries, especially one in such a politically tumultuous position, but that really is a path to stability for so many people around the world.

A YouTuber known for talking about dishwashers and Christmas lights recently put out a long rant about how ridiculous it is that humanity still leans so much on single use fuels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

cosmic_cheese•1h ago

Extensive deployment of renewables and battery storage is perhaps the best thing that can be done anywhere (even in developed countries) for making the grid more robust. Not only is there no fuel supply to be cut off, targets become too diffuse and decentralized to take out quickly, especially if you can manage to cover 30-40% of cities with rooftop solar.

bryanlarsen•1h ago

You can hit a solar plant with a missile, and it can be back in operation with a reduced capacity within a week:

https://www.wanhossolars.com/news/ukrainian-solar-power-plan...

pixl97•22m ago

Honestly I'm not sure if it would take a week in most cases, just took this long in this case. Its really not worth going after the panels with a conventional missile. Maybe something that explodes well above it and litters it with ball bearings would be far more effective.

toomuchtodo•17m ago

If you know it’s coming, you can command the panels on single axis trackers to avoid damage. This is done today for hail and hurricane risk.

lstodd•1h ago

> At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches."

propagandist•1h ago

It also illustrates the importance of not getting caught on the wrong side of the global hegemon right next door who can choke you out and prevent you from importing energy and integrating with the global economy.

A lot of food for thought all around.

mothballed•1h ago

That's definitely part of the equation, but the blockade has been over for a long while. They have suffered not only the brutal effect of US colonization/hegemony but also the brutal effect of the legacy of Castro's brand of economics. If they were just suffering one or the other, they'd be significantly better off.

Edit since I am throttled on posts and cannot reply below: The US briefly blockaded Cuba in the 60s, but they have only embargoed them since then. They are not blocked from international trade by the US, except with the US. There is no meaningful block from Cuba engaging in the greater international non-US "global economy" such as EU,Asia, etc.

user982•57m ago

> the blockade has been over for a long while.

What are you talking about?

bryanlarsen•42m ago

The embargo was partially lifted in 2015. The article is about the effects of the re-tightening in 2025.

user982•33m ago

> The embargo was partially lifted in 2015

And then reinstated in 2017. How has that been "over for a long while"?

roumenguha•47m ago

Do you mean Batista?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

neves•12m ago

You are wrong. Any company that wants to do business with USA must also join the embargo.

buckle8017•54m ago

Much of the developing world is close enough to the equator that solar and batteries just have to last a few days.

In most developed countries solar is seasonal.

anonymars•31m ago

Solar is one type of renewable. The Nordics have done all right

https://www.nordicstatistics.org/news/the-5-large-nordic-cou...

buckle8017•7m ago

They have small populations and so many places to install dams they have their own words for it.

Nobody else can do that.

standardUser•1h ago

I recall visiting Cuba during the second term of Obama (shortly after his visit) and seeing the various reforms that were taking place and feeling very optimistic about the island's future. We saw a lot of highly political art on display, ate at some of the first private restaurants, watched a helicopter explode overt the ocean as they were filming a Fast and Furious film, and went to a nightclub/art show event that rivaled anything I've been to in NYC.

In a sane world, we would be Cuba's largest trading partner and largest source of tourists. In that hypothetical world, the ongoing economic and cultural exchange would have propelled the island towards a different political system. Instead, we doubled down on an approach that has failed for 70+ years.

giancarlostoro•1h ago

In that same world we have Puerto Rico with a fragile power grid. I'm not sure what the best course of action is for Puerto Rico, I am from the Island, and there's just way too many issues on the island, the biggest thing I do know is that the old tax incentives made the island thrive drastically. There was a point in time where Puerto Rico was as high up in terms of production quality as Japan, above the US itself. A lot of pharmaceuticals come from Puerto Rico, so much so that hospitals in Florida have shortages if the Island loses power due to a major hurricane.

logicx24•47m ago

> the ongoing economic and cultural exchange would have propelled the island towards a different political system

The blocker to this has always been the government refusing to reform. I don't see how increased exchange changes this. If anything, the Cuban government would've blocked any integration that threatens their control.

giancarlostoro•1h ago

I have a coworker from Cuba, her grandmother still lives there, this has been going on for about 2 years. She had sent her grandmother a power generator thinking she could just buy gas, but when it became apparent that they have gas shortages, she bought her grandmother a solar based one, this was several months ago if I remember correctly.

D-Machine•53m ago

Cuba is dying and collapsing, with this kind of issue being just a part of a broader systemic set of causes. It is a serious tragedy and humanitarian crisis. If people aren't aware of how bad it is: they haven't had reliable food and electricity for a while now, even parts of Havana and other cities look eerily like a ghost town, and it seems as if almost anyone that is able to has been fleeing.

"Compared to the peak of 11.2 million inhabitants reached in 2012 – the year of the last census – Cuba has lost 13% of its population. [...] A quarter of the island's population is aged 60 and over, and it is the only demographic category that has grown in recent years"

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/04/30/c...

mperham•42m ago

The fossil fuel industry has stolen the bulk of Cuba’s income. Need to switch to solar and batteries to onshore your energy production. China could help here and get a big diplomatic win if they were to give Cuba subsidized access to their clean energy assets.

kyboren•9m ago

[delayed]

rballpug•17m ago

Phenomenological reduction. Cloudflare report on IPv4/IPv6 autonomous systems.

AS27725 shows 96.3% byte uptime over HTTPS. Clangable. https://radar.cloudflare.com/as27725

neves•14m ago

A friend of mine works at SAP, the major German software company. Because they do business with American firms, he had to complete required corporate training on U.S. government restrictions regarding certain countries. The restrictions had different tiers, with only two nations placed in the most severe category: Iran and the peaceful island of Cuba.

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Cubans rendered powerless as outages persist and tensions with US escalate

Comments

Claude Opus 4.6

It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

GPT-5.3-Codex

My AI Adoption Journey

We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)

Animated Knots

Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough

MenuetOS – a GUI OS that boots from a single floppy disk

LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions

Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

Claude Opus 4.6 extra usage promo

There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video]

OpenClaw: When AI Agents Get Full System Access. Security nightmare?

What's wrong with bunny hands on dinosaurs? (2018)

PsiACE/Skills – A small, shared skill library

Ardour 9.0

150 MB Minimal FreeBSD Installation

Cubans rendered powerless as outages persist and tensions with US escalate

Maihem (YC W24): hiring senior robotics perception engineer (London, on-site)

Jane Street Blog – What if writing tests was a joyful experience?

Don't rent the cloud, own instead

Fela Kuti First African to Get Grammys Lifetime Achievement Award

Company as Code

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Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6