Russian oil tankers close in on Cuba after island's worst blackout in decades

Russia has sent two ships carrying crude oil and gas to Cuba as the Caribbean island endures its worst energy crisis in living memory, with a 29-hour nationwide blackout laying bare the depth of a fuel emergency that Washington's sweeping oil embargo has brought to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe.

The first vessel, the Hong Kong-flagged tanker Sea Horse, is believed to be carrying approximately 27,000 tonnes of gas and is expected to dock within days after resuming navigation in the Atlantic following weeks in which it had suspended its course, according to Samir Madani, co-founder of maritime intelligence firm TankerTrackers, who spoke to the Financial Times. A second ship, the Russian tanker Anatoly Kolodkin, is transporting between 725,000 and 728,000 barrels of crude and is due to arrive in early April.

The pair would represent Cuba's first energy deliveries in three months. Just two small tankers had delivered oil to the island in 2026, according to LSEG ship-tracking data.

The shipments come after Cuba's national power grid collapsed entirely on March 16, plunging the island's 10mn inhabitants into darkness for more than 29 hours before electricity was restored by early evening on March 17, according to Cuban energy officials. Even before the grid failure, most Cubans had been living through daily blackouts of 16 hours or more.

According to Reuters, workers restored the Antonio Guiteras facility, the country's largest oil-fired plant, to service by midday on March 17, stabilising the grid after the collapse. However, Cuban energy officials cautioned that generation remained well below demand, offering scant relief to a population exhausted by months of chronic power cuts.

The blackout prompted Cuba's President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to fire back at the Trump administration. "They intend to and announce plans to take over the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to suffocate in order to force us to surrender," he wrote on social media on March 17, shortly after power returned nationwide. A US State Department official rejected that framing, attributing the power failures to governmental mismanagement and describing the blackouts as "a symptom of the failing regime's incompetence".

Cuba generates more than four-fifths of its electricity from ageing Soviet-era oil-fired power plants. The energy crisis has its roots in the removal of subsidised Venezuelan oil following the capture of president Nicolás Maduro in January, which severed what had been the dominant source of Cuba's petroleum imports. US President Donald Trump subsequently signed an executive order authorising tariffs on imports from any country supplying oil to Cuba, a measure that successfully deterred Mexico and other potential suppliers from maintaining shipments.

Trump escalated his rhetoric further on March 16, telling reporters he believed he would have "the honor of taking Cuba," adding: "Whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it . . . They're a very weakened nation right now." The New York Times reported that Díaz-Canel's hold on power is under increasing strain, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American who has publicly stated his desire to see regime change in the island, is believed to be directing backchannel negotiations with figures inside the existing power structure. Trump has repeatedly portrayed Cuba as desperate to reach a deal.

Russia, a long-standing ally of the communist island, moved quickly to project solidarity. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the day after Trump's remarks that Moscow "is ready to provide all possible assistance" to Havana and said the two governments were maintaining contact at working levels as the crisis deepened. Russia's foreign ministry followed with a formal statement condemning what it described as illegal unilateral restrictive measures against a sovereign state and accusing Washington of imposing an "energy blockade" on the island.

For the Kremlin, the shipments carry strategic weight beyond the humanitarian. Russia has spent three years developing the shadow-fleet infrastructure and alternative insurance arrangements needed to circumvent Western sanctions on its own oil exports following the invasion of Ukraine, and faces little additional trade exposure to US reprisals given that bilateral commerce with Washington is, in Peskov's own words, "almost nonexistent."

With Ukraine peace talks tentatively under way and US and Israeli forces engaged against Iran in a conflict that has sent oil prices to their highest in years, the White House's willingness to confront Moscow over a fuel shipment to a besieged Caribbean island faces an unusually high threshold. And both sides know it.