As the sun sets over Havana, darkness is no longer a metaphor. Cuba is experiencing a national blackout of catastrophic proportions. High-rise residents in Havana are trapped in their apartments, elevators stopped between floors, water pumps silent. Thousands are stranded without power, food spoiling in refrigerators, medical equipment idle. This is not a temporary grid failure. It is a systems collapse.
For a nation already under severe economic strain, the loss of electrical power has exposed the fragility of a centralised, imported-fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure. Cuba generates most of its electricity from aged oil-fired plants, regularly crippled by fuel shortages. Once the grid goes down, the consequences cascade: no water purification, no traffic lights, no refrigeration for medicines. The human toll is rising.
Meanwhile, seven thousand kilometres away, the UK’s energy resilience model is being cited by international observers as a stark alternative. The UK has spent two decades incrementally building what analysts call a redundant, distributed energy system. The National Grid maintains protocols for automatic load shedding, rapid regional islanding, and emergency power restoration. Gas storage facilities, interconnectors to Europe, and a growing fleet of offshore wind turbines provide layers of back-up. When Storm Arwen brought down lines in 2021, most homes had power restored within 48 hours. Cuba does not have that margin.
The physical reality is this: all energy systems are vulnerable to perturbation, but the degree of vulnerability is a function of design. Cuba operates on a just-in-time fuel supply with no strategic reserve. The UK, having learned from the 1970s coal strikes and the 2003 blackout, has mandated that National Grid maintain surplus capacity margins. It has invested in decentralised generation: rooftop solar, community batteries, microgrids. Not enough to prevent future crises, but enough to prevent the complete immobilisation of a city.
However, the praise for the UK model is tempered by an uncomfortable truth. The UK’s energy resilience is built on a raft of aging nuclear plants and unabated gas. The annual fuel poverty statistics show 6.3 million households struggle to heat their homes. Resilience without equity is not resilience. The model the world is applauding is a high-carbon system that still fails the most vulnerable. The Cubans trapped in high-rises are experiencing a more acute version of a problem the UK has yet to solve: how to keep the lights on for everyone, especially when the weather turns extreme.
There is a deeper pattern here. As the biosphere destabilises, energy systems will be stressed like never before. Heatwaves overload transformers. Wildfires melt power lines. Floods submerge substations. The Cuban blackout is a preview of what happens when a single failure propagates through a brittle system. The UK’s distributed architecture is better, but it was built for a climate that is rapidly disappearing.
The global energy transition is framed in terms of decarbonisation. But the Cuban crisis reminds us that the first task of any grid is to not let people die. The UK model, for all its fossil-fuel dependency, has at least internalised that basic duty. The next step is to decarbonise the resilience itself. That is the challenge no nation has yet met.
For now, the Cuban people are left in darkness. The UK is held up as a benchmark. The science says both are running out of time.
