Cuba’s energy crisis exposes 60-year blockade’s systemic fuel shortages and global oil dependency
Original framing: “Cuba runs out of diesel and fuel oil” — Financial Times
The embargo itself is a trickster—a policy that claims to 'promote democracy' while weaponizing scarcity to destabilize a government, embodying the absurdity of U.S. foreign policy. Cuba’s response, from bicycle taxis to solar-powered streetlights, mirrors the trickster’s ability to turn constraints into creativity, as described by Lewis Hyde in 'Trickster Makes This World.' The embargo’s contradictions (e.g., allowing food and medicine imports while blocking fuel) reveal the performative cruelty of sanctions, akin to the mythic Coyote’s self-defeating schemes.
Cuba’s diesel shortage is not a sudden failure but the culmination of 60 years of U.S.
sanctions designed to cripple its energy autonomy, a strategy that mirrors historical patterns of economic warfare against socialist governments from Chile to Venezuela. The crisis exposes the fragility of global oil dependency, yet Cuba’s response—rooted in Afro-Cuban communal traditions, 1990s resilience innovations, and scientific evidence of renewable potential—offers a model for energy sovereignty that the West ignores. Marginalized voices, from Black engineers to women-led cooperatives, hold the keys to solutions, while the embargo itself acts as a trickster, revealing the absurdity of policies that claim to 'promote democracy' through scarcity. The path forward requires dismantling sanctions, scaling decentralized renewables, and reviving Cuba’s legacy of grassroots adaptation, proving that energy crises are not inevitable but political choices. The island’s struggle is a microcosm of global energy justice, where the fight for fuel is also a fight for dignity, autonomy, and the right to shape one’s own future.