Díaz-Canel projects firmness as Cuba nears collapse under strain
Havana’s blackouts stretched to 20 to 22 hours as Díaz-Canel answered with salutes, olive drab and appeals to revolutionary discipline.
Miguel Díaz-Canel now looks less like a reformer than the face of a state trying to hold itself together as the lights go out. In Havana, some districts were without electricity for 20 to 22 hours a day, protesters blocked roads and banged pots on May 13, and 65% of Cuban territory was enduring simultaneous blackouts. The contrast is stark: revolutionary ceremony on one side, daily breakdown on the other.
Díaz-Canel has responded by leaning harder into the imagery of control. At Havana’s convention center, he appeared emotional before hundreds of left-wing activists from Europe and Latin America, who chanted that Cuba was not alone. On May 22, he gave a military salute at the anti-imperialist platform near the U.S. embassy and the Malecón, backing 94-year-old Raúl Castro after U.S. charges in the 1996 shootdown case. His increasingly olive-drab, military-inspired look when speaking as head of the National Defense Council has made the presidency feel less like an office of reform than an extension of emergency command.
That is a revealing shift for a leader born on April 20, 1960, in Villa Clara province, who was Raúl Castro’s handpicked successor and became Cuba’s first post-1959 leader not named Castro. The point of his stewardship is no longer to renew the revolution, but to manage its remains. After the United States tightened pressure and an oil blockade in January 2026, Cuban Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said on state television that the country had “completely run out of diesel and fuel oil.” Reuters and France 24 reported that a Russian oil tanker had reached Cuba after January, but the relief did not last.
The damage has moved well beyond politics and into hospitals. On May 15, United Nations officials said more than 100,000 patients, including 11,000 children, were waiting for delayed surgeries because of blackouts and shortages. They said around five million people with chronic illnesses were at risk of interruptions to life-sustaining treatment, and that blackouts lasting up to 20 hours had forced hospitals in some areas to suspend non-emergency operations.
On May 14, Díaz-Canel urged the United States to lift its blockade instead of offering aid, after Marco Rubio renewed a US$100 million aid offer conditioned on distribution through the Catholic Church. Díaz-Canel called the situation “coldly calculated and induced.” That is the terrain he now governs: a country where the symbols of continuity still appear on stage, even as the system behind them runs short of fuel, power and patience.
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