The lights have gone out in Havana, and with them, the last pretence that the Cuban experiment ever truly illuminated anything but delusion. As reports trickle in of rolling blackouts plunging high-rises into darkness, the United Kingdom’s aid agencies are mobilising with the kind of frantic benevolence that has always characterised our relationship with the failing states of the world. It is a tableau that historians will recognise: the spectacle of a once-grand civilisation flickering into obsolescence, while distant empires rush to administer triage.
Let us dispense with the obfuscation. This is not merely a failure of infrastructure; it is the logical conclusion of a political and economic system that has been corroding from within for decades. The Cuban Revolution, that darling of Western intellectuals in the 1960s, has long since devoured its children. The blackouts are not an accident of weather or fortune: they are the material expression of a sclerotic command economy that cannot generate enough energy to power its own capital. The buildings themselves, Soviet-era monoliths, stand as monuments to a philosophy that mistook concrete for progress.
And yet, here come the British aid agencies, with their vans and their hashtags, ready to distribute solar panels and LED bulbs. One admires the impulse, but one must also wince at its historical amnesia. The United Kingdom once presided over a Caribbean empire that extracted sugar and blood from these islands. Now we return, not as conquerors, but as charity workers, offering the same paternalistic solutions dressed in modern garb. Is this not the enduring pattern of Western engagement with the Global South? We bankrupt their soils with our trade, then send them trifles to ease their suffering.
The humanitarian crisis is real, of course. Hospitals running on generators, children sweating in stairwells, the elderly trapped without elevators. These are not abstractions; they are the lived reality of Cubans whose leaders have failed them spectacularly. But the rush to frame this as a simple supply problem betrays a deeper reluctance to confront the ideological roots of the catastrophe. The blackouts are not a malfunction. They are a verdict.
Consider the parallels with the Fall of Rome. Not in the melodramatic sense of barbarians at the gate, but in the quieter erosion of basic civic functions. When the aqueducts failed, when the grain dole dwindled, when the baths grew cold—these were not the causes of Rome’s decline, but its symptoms. Cuba’s blackouts are similarly diagnostic. The state has lost the capacity to perform the fundamental tasks of governance. The mechanism creaks, stalls, and dies.
What then is the role of the outsider? The aid agencies will do their work, and they will do it well. But let us not mistake charity for understanding. The crisis in Cuba is not a call for more Western intervention. It is a grim lesson in what happens when a nation ties its fate to a bankrupt ideology. The lights will come back on, perhaps. But the darkness that follows will be of a different kind: the long, slow dusk of a society that has run out of ideas.
The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that empire demanded a certain seriousness of purpose. We no longer have an empire, but we still have the urge to improve. Perhaps we should instead learn to watch, and to witness. The Cubans do not need our solar panels half as much as they need our honest recognition that their tragedy is not a natural disaster. It is a political one. And no shipment of batteries can remedy that.
