Lightning, a chain of fireball explosions so large they could be seen 65 miles away in Havana, and a lingering stench of sulfur.
The five-day fire at Cuba’s main oil storage facility in Matanzas was sparked by lightning on Friday night. Over the next few days, the flames spread “like an Olympic torch” to three more tanks containing hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of fuel, according to the region’s governor, Mario Sabines.
Only on Tuesday was the conflagration finally brought under control. By then, it had killed at least one person and injured 125 others, dealing a critical blow to Cuba’s energy infrastructure.
And as the smoke clears, there is speculation that this – and the blackouts that will inevitably follow – could further destabilize the “Cuban revolution”, already at one of the most dangerous moments in its 63-year history.
Millions of Cubans, especially those in rural provinces, have been living with daily power outages lasting hours for months. In the August heat, food rots quickly and sleep becomes almost impossible.
The situation is tense: the immediate trigger for last summer’s unprecedented protests was a 12-hour power cut.
In Matanzas, Odalys Medina Peña, 60, said she had long gotten used to cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner before dawn in anticipation of blackouts.
“You have to adapt and see if the country can resolve the situation. When something like this happens, everyone comes together, because if Cuba has one thing, it’s humanity.”
But with toxic smog blotting out much sunlight in Havana over the weekend, the mood in the capital was less stoic.
A resident sits against a wall as smoke rises in the background of the fire. Photograph: Ismael Francisco/AP
“I’m afraid of this horrible cloud and I’m worried about power cuts,” said Adilen Sardinas, 29, who is eight months pregnant. “How will the State do it?”
Officials have not said how much crude oil, diesel and fuel oil was lost in the fire, but Cubans are already bracing for an even more severe energy crisis.
Oil shipments from Venezuela have declined as South American ally Cuba struggles to refine enough oil for its own needs. The increase in world oil prices caused by the war in Ukraine has also made it more difficult for Cuba to buy it on the world market.
But analysts say the double whammy of Covid, which shut down tourism in 2020 and 2021, and US sanctions has been decisive.
“Cuban foreign exchange inflows almost halved between 2018 and 2021,” said Emily Morris, a development economist at University College London. “Despite reducing fuel and food supplies to an essential minimum, in 2021 they accounted for more than half of all import spending, with more severe cuts in all other imports, including spare parts, production inputs , equipment equipment and consumer goods, so you can see what a devastating effect it would have.”
Despite Joe Biden’s campaign promise to reverse Trump’s “policies that harmed Cubans and their families,” the bulk of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the island remains.
Tankers carrying Venezuelan oil to Cuba still face sanctions. Analysts say this forces the island to pay a premium on freight.
While Venezuela and Mexico sent specialized equipment and more than a hundred tons of extinguishing foam, the US provided technical assistance. “So far, the United States has offered a phone number to a local emergency authority,” Johana Tablada, the deputy director of US affairs at the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote on Twitter.
Fulton Armstrong, who was the US intelligence community’s top analyst on Latin America, said there is “a fear among supporters of a return to the normalization process started by President Obama that the [Biden] the administration has… the private hope that the energy and other problems are proof that ‘the regime’ is failing”.
Jorge Piñón, director of the Latin American and Caribbean energy and environment program at the University of Texas at Austin, said that even before the fire, his modeling had predicted a “collapse total” of the island’s energy network this summer.
He also noted that a Russian tanker carrying 115,000 tons of oil was due to dock at the port of Matanzas later this week. “Where will he go?”