Our hearts go out to our Cuban brothers and sisters who are currently getting strangled alive! Yes… alive! Through no fault of their own, except standing for their freedom. Cuba has been struggling, facing embargo for over 64 years (the US imposed embargo on Cuba on February 3, 1962), and now, since January 3rd when the US kidnapped the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife (Pirates of the Caribbeans in Venezuela, or the Renewed Face of the Far West), Cuba has been denied any oil imports. Until then, Venezuela had been providing 50 % of all of Cuba’s oil. Since then, all other countries, like Mexico, which were providing oil to Cuba have stopped after getting threatened by American president Donald Trump with tariffs. On Monday, the power grid collapsed, and on Wednesday power was partially restored to the island of 11 millions. Faced with years of embargo, Cuba’s power grid is aging and now with the recent oil blocade, it is falling apart. Highways are deserted, hospitals suffer, doctors operate with candle lights, and mothers give birth in darkness.

Whatever happens, Cuba is a beacon to the ‘small’ people of the world, and we stand with them. Cubans with Fidel Castro (Fidel Castro: Ideas cannot be Killed!) have shown us that the size of a country or its people does not matter when fighting for freedom and principles. Cuba is a small country, but its actions, its help, has been immense to Africa for the past 50 years. Even to this day, doctors across Africa have been trained in Cuba, and Cuban doctors have vastly supported the health-care services of many countries including Ghana. We stand with them!

Excerpts below are from Al Jazeera.

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Cuba has reconnected its power grid and brought online its largest oil-fired power plant, energy officials said, putting an end to a nationwide blackout that lasted more than 29 hours amid a United States move to choke off the island’s fuel supply.

After the country’s 10 million people had been plunged into darkness overnight, the Caribbean island’s national power grid had fully come back online by 6:11pm (22:11 GMT) on Tuesday. However, officials said power shortages may continue because not enough electricity is being generated.

In addition to cutting off oil sales to Cuba, US President Donald Trump has escalated his rhetoric against the Communist-run island, saying on Monday he could do anything he wanted with the country.

A US State Department official blamed the Cuban government for the grid collapse, calling blackouts a “symptom of the failing regime’s incompetence”.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel fired back at Washington, criticising its “almost daily public threats against Cuba”.

“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,” Diaz-Canel wrote on social media on Tuesday night, shortly after power returned nationwide.

Cuba has yet to say what caused Monday’s nationwide grid failure, the first such collapse since the US cut off the island’s oil supply from Venezuela and threatened to slap tariffs on countries that ship fuel to the nation.

By midday on Tuesday, grid workers successfully fired up the Antonio Guiteras power plant, a decades-old behemoth that underpins the country’s power grid.

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