Cuba’s lights are starting to come back on, but its crisis is far from over Oil and Gas News

Electricity supplies are slowly being restored in Havana, but the country’s deep crisis in relations with the US is local, long-term.

Traffic lights are finally back on in Havana, but most of Cuba is still in the dark.

Cuba’s national power grid went down again on Monday and there was no power supply across the country for most of Tuesday. Power is slowly being restored in the capital, but much of the country is still without supply, Al Jazeera’s Ed Augustine reported from Havana on Tuesday.

Power outages began in Cuba in 2019, the first time the Trump administration began hitting the country with so-called peak-pressure sanctions.

He aimed to boost the country’s economy by billions of dollars a year, and as a result, the communist government had to drastically cut energy imports because it was running out of cash.

But now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, the United States has upped the ante once again.

Since late January, the Trump administration has imposed a total oil embargo on the island, meaning no oil has entered the country for nearly three months.

Unsurprisingly, in Cuba, which relies heavily on oil to generate electricity, that means power outages are becoming more frequent and longer.

It has been confirmed that the two governments, which are two old enemies, are once again locked in negotiations.

On Monday, Cuban Vice Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga announced that Cuban citizens living abroad, including in the US state of Miami, Florida, will soon be allowed to invest directly in their homeland and own businesses in Cuba.

That is a pro-market reform; There have been many of them in recent years, but what’s interesting about this one is how well it maps to what Trump has been saying repeatedly in recent weeks — that any deal must be good for Florida’s Cuban-American community.

“We don’t know the details of the negotiations,” Augustine reported.

“They seem to be mostly focused on economic reforms, but with the U.S. oil embargo lowering living standards right now, I can tell you that most people on this island are in favor of some kind of deal.”