The party is officially over in Havana, and for once, it is not because the rum ran dry. The **Habanos Festival**, the world's premier gathering where wealthy foreigners descend upon an island of struggle to burn **premium Cuban cigars**, has been called off. It has been postponed until further notice. Why? Because the **Cuba energy crisis** has turned the lights out. Literally.

Cuba is currently drowning in a power outage and fuel shortage that would be funny if it were not so deeply tragic. There is no fuel. There is no power. The country is running on fumes, and apparently, there are not enough fumes left to handle the logistics of shuttling cigar aficionados from the airport to their luxury hotels. It is a moment of perfect, dark irony. The government has spent decades selling the romance of the revolution alongside the ultimate capitalist luxury product. Now, the infrastructure has collapsed so thoroughly that they cannot even pretend to host the show anymore.

Of course, we cannot discuss this mess without optimizing our understanding of the neighbor to the north: The United States and its endless **US blockade on Cuba**. It is a policy that has been in place since my grandmother was young, and it has achieved precisely nothing except making life miserable for normal people. The US government recently tightened the screws, making it harder for fuel to get to the island. It is a bureaucratic form of torture. They sit in comfortable, air-conditioned offices in Washington, signing papers that turn off the lights in Havana. They call it foreign policy; I call it petty bullying by a superpower that ran out of new ideas fifty years ago.

Let us look at what this festival actually is. It is a theater of the absurd. You have collectors from Europe and Asia preparing to fly in to celebrate a product made by people who are currently struggling to cook their dinner because the gas is gone. The **Habanos Festival** brings in millions of dollars—a critical financial lifeline for the island. For the Cuban government to cancel it, things must be truly desperate. It is an admission of defeat. They are essentially saying, "We cannot even guarantee that the air conditioning will work for the VIPs."

I have a hard time feeling sorry for the attendees, though. Oh, you cannot fly to the Caribbean to smoke your **Cohibas** in a fancy lounge? What a tragedy. The "aficionados' bonanza," as they call it, is a bubble. Inside the bubble, everything is supposed to be fine. There is music, smoke, and laughter. Outside the bubble, the real world is falling apart. Now, the real world has finally popped the bubble. The shortage of international travel logistics and the lack of energy means the rich have to stay home and smoke in their own libraries.

This situation exposes the crumbling reality of the infrastructure. You can blame the blockade—and you should, because it is cruel—but you also have to look at the management on the ground. You cannot run a country on nostalgia and vintage cars forever. Eventually, the power plants break. Eventually, the grid fails. It is the slow-motion car crash of a system that has been held together with duct tape and hope for too long. The blockade pushes it over the edge, but the edge was already there. It is a failure of imagination on both sides of the ocean.

So, the cigars will stay in the humidors. The tourists will stay in their comfortable homes. And the people of Cuba will continue to wait in the dark. It is a perfect metaphor for the state of the world right now. The leaders are incompetent, the policies are outdated, and the only thing we have plenty of is darkness. The festival is postponed, they say. But looking at the state of things, one wonders if the party will ever really start again. It is just another closed door in a world full of them.

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### References & Fact-Check * **Original Event:** The organizers of the 24th Habanos Festival have postponed the event due to logistical challenges and the energy crisis. * **Primary Source:** [BBC News: Cuban cigar festival called off as US blockade worsens energy crisis](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q30k2xzk2o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss) * **Key Context:** The cancellation highlights the severity of Cuba's current economic and energy instability, exacerbated by US sanctions and aging infrastructure.