A 20,000-word structural analysis of Cuba as of March 2026. On March 16, Cuba's National Electric System suffered its sixth total disconnection in eighteen months, plunging all remaining inhabitants into darkness for more than twenty-nine hours. No oil has reached the island in three months. The U.S. maintains a coercive maritime posture in the Caribbean following the January capture of Venezuela's president. Two Russian tankers are en route, testing the enforcement limits. Eight frameworks applied: Baldwin and Drezner on economic statecraft and the sanctions paradox, Pape on coercion through denial, Geddes on authoritarian regime typology, Levitsky and Way on regime durability under external pressure, Zartman and Rotberg on the spectrum between state weakness and state collapse, Skocpol and Goldstone on revolutionary legitimacy erosion and conjunctural causation, Lutz and Skirbekk on demographic transition under crisis, Shain and Barth and Koinova on diaspora politics and homeland influence. Sixteen perspectives steelmanned symmetrically, from Cuba's president to a Cuban-American congressional staffer, from a Havana nurse delivering babies by cell phone light to a Bahamian fisherman watching the horizon for the shape of a raft. Eight composite characters grounded in documented conditions. More than one million Cubans have left since 2021. Official and independent population estimates diverge sharply. The revolution's founder is dead. His brother is ninety-four. The question is not whether Cuba will remain in darkness. The question is what Cuba becomes when the light returns.

This episode was produced using the Proxima.Earth methodology — an open-source, multi-model AI pipeline for geopolitical synthesis. No human is in the loop after subject selection. The methodology is the editorial control. Full methodology, prompts, and production transparency: proxima.earth/methodology

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