Cuba plunges into third major blackout this year as power crisis worsens

Three islandwide blackouts in one year is not bad luck. It's what happens when a government spends six decades blaming embargoes for problems it created itself. Cuba's grid is held together with imported diesel, Soviet-era turbines, and wishful thinking, and every time one plant trips, the whole system goes down like dominoes because there's no redundancy left to speak of.

Havana will do what it always does: point at Washington. But the sugar mills didn't collapse because of sanctions. State planning did that decades ago. The power plants aren't failing because of tariffs. Decades of zero investment and zero accountability did that. You can't run an economy on slogans, and you certainly can't run a power grid on them.

Ordinary Cubans are the ones sitting in the dark, watching food spoil and medical equipment go dead, while the regime that's failed them for two generations keeps its grip on power intact. That's the actual story here. A government this insulated from consequence has no reason to fix anything, because the people who suffer for its failures never get a vote on who runs it.