A UK trade mission to Cuba has been cancelled. Not because of hurricanes or embargoes, but because of something far more embarrassing: the lights went out. Literally. And they have stayed out, or flickered, or come on only to torment. In Havana’s high-rises, the elevators are dead. The water pumps are silent. The refrigerators are warm tombs. This is not a story about energy policy. It is a story about the slow death of a civilisation that forgot how to maintain its own circuits.
We have seen this before. The late Roman Empire did not fall to barbarians in a single battle. It fell with a thousand small failures. The aqueducts silted up. The roads crumbled. The grain ships stopped arriving. And in the villas of the senators, the lamps burned dimmer each year until one night they did not burn at all. Cuba is not Rome, of course. But the pattern is familiar. A regime that cannot keep the lights on for its own people is a regime that has lost the tacit contract of governance. The trade mission’s cancellation is a diplomatic euphemism. The real message is: we cannot do business with a ghost state.
And what of the inhabitants? They endure, as people do. They climb twenty flights of stairs. They share food. They gossip by candlelight. They are resilient, we say, as if resilience were a virtue rather than a curse. The Victorians would have called it ‘pluck’. But they would also have called it a scandal. For all their faults, the Victorians understood that a great nation’s first duty is to its own infrastructure. They built sewers and railways and gas works. They did not leave their citizens to fend for themselves in the dark. Cuba’s blackouts are not an act of God. They are an act of administrative neglect, compounded by ideology and corruption.
The current crisis is also a mirror. Western intellectuals have long romanticised Cuba as a defiant little island. It was noble, they said, in its resistance to the American colossus. But nobility does not power a generator. And romanticism does not refuel a power plant. The blackouts reveal a deeper truth: a nation that cannot maintain its own grid is a nation that has ceased to be a modern state. It is a museum piece, preserved for tourists but uninhabitable for its own people.
Let us be clear. The cancellation of the trade mission is a small event in the great ledger of geopolitics. But it is also a sign of the times. The world is dividing into those who can keep the lights on and those who cannot. The former includes the rising Asian powers with their relentless focus on engineering and logistics. The latter includes too many of the old socialist experiments, along with some of the new libertarian fantasies. The lesson is simple: ideology does not power a light bulb. Coal does. Gas does. Nuclear does. And, yes, so do renewables, but only if you maintain them.
Cuba’s blackouts are a parable for our age. They remind us that the most basic function of government is not freedom or justice or equality. It is the ability to keep the lights on. Everything else is commentary. The UK trade mission cancellation is a small footnote in that parable. But it is a telling one. For when the lights go out in Havana, they also go out in London, in the sense that the illusion of business as usual is extinguished. We are left with the raw, flickering truth of our own fragility. And that, I suspect, is a lesson we would rather not learn.
