Elite-linked businesses thrive as Cubans face shortages and blackouts

While families across Cuba wait in line for food, ration fuel and sit through blackouts, a network of elite-linked businesses is reportedly generating billions inside the island’s state-connected economy. The gap has become impossible to ignore: one Cuba is dark, short on basics and stuck in crisis, while another appears to keep profiting behind the same walls of scarcity.

The pressure on daily life has been building for months. A 2024 World Food Programme country brief described Cuba as trapped in a prolonged economic downturn marked by persistent inflation, dwindling fiscal resources and chronic fuel shortages. It also said the country’s sluggish post-COVID tourism recovery continued to drag on the economy. Those problems have shown up in every corner of the island, from Havana to Santiago de Cuba, as shelves thin out and transportation becomes harder to count on.

Electricity has been one of the sharpest fault lines. On 18 October 2024, Cuba suffered a nationwide blackout after the Antonio Guiteras power plant failed in Matanzas. The grid collapsed twice in 24 hours, and authorities said they had restored power to nearly one-fifth of the population after the first breakdown. Just weeks later, on 4 December 2024, another nationwide outage again left millions without power. Reuters reported that the nation of about 10 million was already struggling with dramatic shortages of food, medicine and fuel.

The government in Havana has blamed the crisis on a lack of foreign currency, inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, and fuel shortages, while also pointing to the U.S. embargo as a central cause of the shortages. But the economic strain has fed anger on the streets. In March 2024, protests broke out in Santiago de Cuba and other cities over prolonged power outages and food shortages, among the most serious unrest the country had seen since the early 1990s.

That is the backdrop for the latest revelations about a secretive elite business web. Under Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s official economy has remained under severe stress, yet the state-linked network tied to privileged insiders is said to keep thriving. For ordinary Cubans, the result is a cruel double standard: more blackouts, fewer goods and less room to breathe, while the people closest to power keep extracting value from the same collapsing system.