When The Lights Go Out in Cuba

The lights have gone out in Havana before. I was there for some of it — in the late nineties and into the early aughts– the years the Cubans called the Special Period, when the grid would go down on a schedule everyone knew and no one liked. These apagones, or rolling blackouts were absorbed as chronic conditions: with typical ingenuity and low-grade fury. I marveled, then mirrored the practiced calm of people who knew the lights would eventually come back. They always came back. Folks planned around them; lit candles, moved toward wherever the sea breeze could be felt, and congregated on moonlit streets, because Havana has its own kind of light at night. The matinee disco in El Vedado would go dark for a few hours and come back up. Dancers would simply pick up where they left off — electric slide meeting rumba in the resumed dark, which is to say, in the resumed life. The apagones did not spell stasis or defeat. They were evidence of improvisation under siege — and the proof was that the lights kept coming back. What was warped was never the island. It was the perception of the island, the Cuba of the American postcard, which required stasis to sustain its own meaning.

When I heard what was happening now — the grid collapsed three times in March 2026, eleven million people in the dark with no schedule, no promised return, no hours to plan around — my mind went immediately to Assata. To Nehanda and the microbrigade on the outskirts of the city where my sister lived, in that small apartment, on so little, with such grace. I thought about what it means when the lights go out and no one can tell you when they are coming on again. When Venceremos finally runs out — not in defeat but in exhaustion.

I did not expect to return to this material through darkness. But here we are.

I want to offer a different quality of light by which to read this moment — the kind that allows us to see the failures of our liberation movements as something other than proof positive of the failure of our living. That is what Nehanda taught me. It is what I owe her, and what I owe the island that kept her. The disco ball—that kaleidoscopic time-space machine which holds the living and the dead in the same turning light, hangs motionless.

I wrote two books reflecting on these themes — ¡Venceremos?, which chronicled Black Cubans negotiating the Revolution’s promises and failures; and There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, which returned to Nehanda and Assata, and the question their lives in exile, like those who were at home on the island, kept posing: what does it mean to insist on living a ‘good’ life, rather than merely enduring it — inside conditions that seem to make it impossible.

I first went to Cuba in 1998, as a student researcher. I went back, and kept going back, for years, not only as an ethnographer chronicling the island’s singular position, but also — mostly — because of relationships. Underneath all of it, two women whom I love: Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, who taught me in Havana what political exile costs; and the woman I called ‘Sister’ in print because she was still alive and in the crosshairs of bounty hunters planning her capture. Both showed me what Che Guevara meant when he said: at the risk of seeming ridiculous — a true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. If he had danced until dawn with them as I did, he would have added that an effective revolutionary is fueled by friendship, laughter, and good rum. Both of those sisters died free on that shimmering island that I too came to love and respect. Nehanda in 2019. Assata Shakur — whom I can now name, since there is nothing left that can harm her — in 2025.

Today, the situation is worse than I would have imagined when I was living in Cuba and for the long while my attention was trained on the island and its neighbors. There was widespread deprivation during the Special Period, but la lucha — the structural and profound daily struggle through which most Cubans faced intermittent blackouts, food shortages, and crumbling infrastructure, with creativity and communal ingenuity as a form of defiance — did not signal altogether surrendering belief that the Revolution had promised them something real, amid accumulating broken promises. They were able to improvise with the help of openings in tourism and cultural exchange that provided a thin but real circulation of outside connection and divisas (foreign currency) — along with the freedoms and humiliations that come with each. Today, things are different.

The discontent and frustration that many of us had documented for many years finally cracked the surface in July 2021 — when Black Cubans in the island’s poorest neighborhoods took to the streets in the largest protests since the Revolution, chanting Patria y Vida! (Homeland and Life), riffing off the revolutionary slogan of homeland or death, and abajo la dictadura (down with the dictatorship). A 2020 survey of over a thousand Cubans, by sociologists Katrin Hansing and Bert Hoffmann, documented what my fieldwork had shown and what the government’s own statistics refused to name: racial inequalities were returning along prerevolutionary lines— structured by who had been able to leave and send remittances, who had access to the new private economy, and who was left to luchar in the streets. The government’s response to the protests was mass arrest and sentences of up to twenty years. Many of those who bore the longest sentences were Black.

There is also, far beyond Cuba, a recognition of the material support of the Cuban revolutionary government: among Black people in the diaspora, the international left, and among the nations and movements that had understood Cuba not as a perfect socialist experiment but as proof that a small, embargoed island could stand against the empire and offer something — medical care, hurricane and earthquake relief, solidarity, sanctuary — that no one else dared to attempt. This is expressed in the Cuban revolutionary slogan Venceremos! (we will win) — eventually, and in any case we will continue to fight. Hasta la Victoria Siempre (Always, until victory), the slogan goes. That recognition and commitment was heard and felt differently in different places. In Havana it had the specific ring of people who had staked their lives on it. In Kingston and Port-au-Prince, for example, the resonance of this promise was profoundly felt — doctors who arrived when no one else would come. Closer to home for me: in Harlem, it echoed for a people who had sent their sisters there for protection and hoped for the best. My book started with turning this declarative exclamation into an interrogative — more urgent and plaintive because that is what I owed my respondents — ¡Venceremos? Will we win?

Cuba sent doctors to Jamaica for nearly fifty years; to West Africa during Ebola; to Pakistan in the wake of the 2005 earthquake, after Washington refused its citizens the same offer post-Katrina and the failure of faulty levees. The record is long. The blockade is settling accounts with all of it.

This is the Cuba now going dark. Blocked by U.S. policy and U.S. ships, oil had not arrived in three months. A rapist had announced he can “take” and “do anything I want” with Cuba. Oil tankers came to the edge of Cuban waters and were turned away. The Sea Horse diverted. The Ocean Mariner veered off toward the Bahamas. When the U.S. temporarily eased Russian oil sanctions globally in early March, as it entered another war, it explicitly excluded Cuba. But the Russian ship Anatoly Kolodkin docked at Matanzas on March 31, with 730,000 barrels– the first oil in three months. Trump let it through. Even rapists have creditors. “We don’t mind somebody getting a boatload,” he said, “because they have to survive.” Then he said Cuba was finished. A second Russian tanker is on its way.

The response from those who remember what Cuba gave them was immediate.The Nuestra América Convoy — 650 people from 38 nations on a boat named for José Martí, because governments could not do what the people would — arrived in Havana carrying solar panels and medicine and themselves. Mexico dispatched naval vessels. Even as his own government was ending its fifty-year medical agreement under U.S. pressure, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness stood before CARICOM and told the chilling truth: “Humanitarian suffering serves no one. A prolonged crisis in Cuba will not remain confined to Cuba.”

Still, his government did what was expedient. Jamaica ended its fifty-year medical agreement with Cuba under U.S. pressure — withdrawing 277 Cuban health workers from the rural clinics they had staffed since 1976, through hurricanes and pandemics and the ordinary emergencies of Black Caribbean life. The words and the deed were not meant to reconcile. History, and the Jamaican people, will have to decide what to call that; just as we in the US must sit with the silence from mainstream US Black political organizations — another telling fact about where and how far the embattled can reach toward one another.

Cuba trained Haitian doctors and sent medical brigades when the earthquake struck in 2010 — arriving before anyone else, as they always did. Like Black US, Haiti cannot return the favor now. It is fighting for its own survival. Haiti’s government is overwhelmed by gang violence and political collapse — its people among the most embattled in the hemisphere. Two of the oldest Black republics in this part of the world — both born in revolution, both subjected to more than a century of U.S. intervention: both still paying the price. They cannot reach each other across the water right now.

Nelson Mandela’s first trip after his release from prison was to Havana, because Cuba had understood in practice and not only in rhetoric, that there are obligations that do not run upward toward power, but sideways— toward the ones the powerful have marked for destruction. In contrast stands the logic of the colonizer — the man who has decided that the only sovereignty is his own and the question of consent does not apply to him: “I could do anything I want with it,” he said, echoing the logic and language of rape.

These are the logics that my respondents in ¡Venceremos? were negotiating — through their friendships and everyday insistence on a deeper self that was not available for consumption — insisting, you do not own me, no matter what your deed says. Assata and Nehanda knew this. Their refusal to be captured and their presence on that island as free women was embodied and undeniable proof against this logic. Cuba kept them against the full pressure of the United States government: through every administration from Kennedy through the current regime — resisting decades of diplomatic coercion, including from Obama, whose FBI doubled the bounty on Assata’s head and placed her on the Most Wanted Terrorist list, even as he made the only solid gestures toward normalization and, in a historic turn, visited the island.

The man now conducting those negotiations — the Cuban-American US Secretary of State Marco Rubio — spent his Senate career demanding that Cuba return Assata Shakur, whom he said “belongs in jail.” After her death in September 2025, he declared that Cuba “continues to provide a safe haven for terrorists and criminals, including fugitives from the United States.” The embargo remained. The bounty remained. Cuba kept them both anyway. Cuba said no repeatedly, consistently, at a real cost to itself. The current blockade is, in part, the continuation of that demand by other means.

It is undeniable that the revolutionary government that sheltered Assata and Nehanda also silenced, surveilled, and in some periods persecuted Black Cuban artists, queer Cubans, and Black women whose politics were too loud or too embodied — illegible in the narrow grammar of revolution, — as were those whose politics were seen as too connected to the U.S. imperial project. Nearly all of my respondents from ¡Venceremos? left the island before my book was published. The island that was a Palenque, a maroon camp, for two extraordinary African women born in the US, was also a place from which a generation of Black Cubans fled. Both things are true. Irresolution is a fact of Black life.

And here is another instructive irresolution: where the Black left failed, Cuba came through. The conditions that made exile necessary— putting Nehanda and Assata on FBI lists and in danger and eventually on planes to Havana, away from their families, were conditions that the Black left in the United States was not powerful enough, not organized enough, not sufficiently free of its own patriarchy and homophobia and factionalism to address. Nehanda’s mother, Large Marge, told me: it is like fighting a nuclear bomb with a slingshot. She thought it was stupid. I celebrate the courage, but also mourn the shoddiness of the slingshot.

We are back, therefore — or rather, we never left — the conjuncture Huey P. Newton called “survival pending revolution.” In Cuba and elsewhere, this is a moment in which the scale and depth of retrenchment and dispossession means that the first order of business is not necessarily to win but to live to fight another day. This is what the Jamaican PM announced. “Capitulation” with a gun to one’s head. We recognize these old plantation logics. To keep the people fed and housed and breathing; to hold the line against the possibility of something better. Newton understood “survival” as a way station, a set of programs and commitments that would sustain the people until conditions permitted a more frontal engagement.

But survival pending revolution describes the floor. It does not describe what people do on or above the floor. As the t-shirts I see young people wearing say, “Assata taught me,” and Nehanda taught me something very different. What must we preserve; reach toward; insist on and refuse to give up, even when everything else has been stripped away? Nehanda fundraising to distribute much-needed hygiene products and foundation garments to Cuban women (for “uplift” she said cheekily); scrimping to cater gala ‘Anti-Imperialist Thanksgiving’ dinners; and she and I eating black market lobster brought to my door after having fallen off a truck bound for a resort, and drinking the oldest rum we could find in Havana — not despite the deprivation, not in ignorance of it, but fully inside it with full knowledge of what surrounded her on the island she could not leave, is beyond the floor of survival: it reaches toward joy and insists on pleasure. It does not describe the electric slide arriving in El Vedado and leaving with rumba moves added, which is to say, transformed into something neither origin could have produced alone. It cannot begin to describe Nehanda at her 50th birthday — daughter of Oshun, resplendent in gold, light flickering in the warm glow of Caribbean sunset. We danced on that floor through the dark night, until sunrise. Black folks dance on the floor of survival.

I have spent more than twenty years as an ethnographer trying to understand what happens in those moments — parsing life and death on the dancefloor. Not the politics of survival, but the something else. The practices, pleasures, and the ethical philosophies by which Black people have always insisted on a life that is not merely endured but lived. What I have been calling, in my notebooks and my thinking for some time now, ‘the Black good life’ — not an escape from the murderous conjuncture of plantation logics, and certainly not ignorant of its structuring function. It is a response, and sometimes a refusal, that is as sophisticated a theory and movida as any other.

Nehanda understood this and tried to teach me in a way Marxist theory and continental philosophy never could. She said: I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with a Mercedes, I just think everyone ought to have one. That is not a contradiction. It is a critique of who gets to flourish, and an equally serious insistence on the answer: everyone. That flourishing is not bourgeois and is not naive and is not a distraction from more serious forms of political engagement. It is itself a form of political engagement — perhaps the oldest one we have and certainly what we can manage in the current tense of pending.

Nehanda Isoke Abiodun — Cheri, Cherry, Nia, LaVerne, Mama Nehanda — died in Havana on January 30, 2019. She had lived on that island for nearly thirty years, protected; a New Afrikan revolutionary who arrived as a fugitive and became the Godmother of Cuban hip-hop — tutoring generations of Afro-Cuban artists in Black history and consciousness, holding Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving every year, keeping her people’s secrets and fighting for their material lives. She said that the prospect of going to prison frightened her but living as a neo-slave terrorized her. I wrote about her in There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, another love letter I owed her. Assata Shakur died in Havana on September 25, 2025. She was 78 years old. The Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced it simply and quietly: health conditions and advanced age. She had lived in Cuba for forty-one years — also protected by a revolutionary government that understood her not as a fugitive, but as what both women were: a political prisoner of a war the United States had waged against its own Black population. Both women died free, and we have the contradictory and embattled Cuban revolution to thank for that.

Cuba’s revolutionary government was not — is not — without serious failures of its own. I argued in ¡Venceremos? that the Revolution recuperated pre-revolutionary racial and sexual ideologies rather than dismantling them. The reparative, affirmatively acting policies that might have begun to address the historically entrenched inequities of the Cuban slave state never materialized.

Still, the Revolution had not only promised something real but had delivered in a number of ways; under the crushing weight of the U.S. Embargo, which now looks bent on finishing its job of isolation and conquest. The revolution — however flawed and shot through with the same racial and sexual logics it claimed to have overturned — was worth defending. My respondents believed this, in different registers and with different degrees of irony. Assata believed it — she called Cuba “one of the largest, most resistant and most courageous Palenques that has ever existed.” Nehanda believed it, with the peculiar conviction of someone for whom Cuba was a lifeline. I believe it, too, in my way. Or, I believed in the people who believed in it, which sometimes may be the same thing.

The grid is down. And they are gone. The disco ball hangs motionless in the dark.

I am still learning what they were teaching. And I know there is still dancing in Cuba. Even in the dark.

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Jafari Sinclaire Allen is professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) at Columbia University, where he is the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), and editor-in-chief of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Society, and Culture