The news from Cuba is grim. Blackouts, rolling and relentless, have plunged high-rise residents into a state of pre-industrial darkness. This is not merely a technical failure. It is a parable of civilisational decay, a recapitulation of the fall of Rome, and a stark warning to the West. While British engineers now offer grid solutions, one must ask: why are we always the ones to clean up after the ideological fantasies of others?
Cuba’s power grid, a crumbling monument to Soviet-era planning and subsequent abandonment by the global market, has become a symbol of systemic rot. The blackouts are not accidental; they are the inevitable result of a society that prioritised delusional self-sufficiency over pragmatic interdependence. For decades, the island’s leadership clung to a romanticised agrarian myth, refusing to modernise its infrastructure. Now, the high-rises of Havana—those once-proud symbols of revolutionary ambition—stand as vertical tombs, their inhabitants trapped in a darkness that mirrors the intellectual obscurantism of their rulers.
Enter the British engineers. With quiet professionalism, they offer technical expertise: more efficient turbines, smarter grid management, modular solar arrays. This is admirable, but it misses the point. The problem is not merely technological. It is civilisational. Cuba’s blackouts are a symptom of a deeper malaise: the inability of a closed system to adapt, to innovate, to embrace the messy, dynamic complexity of modernity. The same malaise, I fear, is creeping into our own societies. Look at the intellectual decadence of our universities, the infantilisation of political discourse, the fetishisation of victimhood over excellence. We are not immune.
The British engineers, bless their pragmatic hearts, will likely patch the grid. Power will flicker back on in Havana. But the underlying rot will remain until Cubans—and their Western admirers—abandon the cult of the isolated island and embrace the arduous task of building a resilient, open society. Until then, the lights will go out again. And we, the engineers of the West, will be called upon to fix the mess. Again. Because that is what empires do. They clean up. And then they collapse.
Let us learn from Cuba’s darkness before our own grid fails. The high-rises of Havana are a mirror. What do you see in it?
