Aforeign businessman witnessed an unusual event last month at eastern Santiago de Cuba’s main port.

Stevedores were unloading a precious cargo of the Cubans’ favored staple, rice, when they were told to pause their labors under a broiling sun and tend to an incoming ship.

The region, like the rest of the country, has suffered through five years of a deepening crisis that has left the lights off more than they are on, factories and offices idle, ports short of working equipment, and millions scrambling for food, medicine, fuel, and just about everything else.

I asked my friend what could be more important than rice during these hard times.

“Solar panels, millions of them,” he replied.

Some 550 miles to the west, at the Mariel container terminal just outside Havana, such events have become commonplace over the last six months, the businessman and other Mariel clients said.

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A rumor spread that the China containers pouring into the port came with fuel, as they were whisked out of Mariel as soon as they arrived.

“The ships jump the line to berth and unload. The containers are immediately trucked out and avoid the weeks-long wait for transport,” he said, requesting anonymity.

A year ago, Cuba and China signed two contracts, one to complete 48 solar farms with a combined capacity of 1,200 megawatts (MW) this year, and another to install a similar number thereafter, meeting around half of current electricity demand. At the same time, the country suspended new hotel development, freeing up funds, equipment, and labor for the project.

The National Statistics office (ONEI) reported at the end of April that so far this year energy development has replaced tourism as the country’s top investment at 27.2 percent, while tourism related funding has fallen from the perch for the first time in years, capturing 14.1 percent compared with 25.3 percent during the same period in 2024.

“We are preserving the environment, and we are seeking development and economic and social growth with these investments,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel recently told a small group of foreign journalists, “but for now, we are exposed to things as annoying as blackouts, sometimes for many hours.”

Cuba’s economy has shrunk more than 15 percent since 2019 and agricultural output and manufacture much more, a crisis set off, officials say, by harsher sanctions imposed during President Donald Trump’s first term, continued by Biden, and compounded by the pandemic, current international instability, and domestic policy mistakes.

Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign deprived Cuba of access to the US tourism market partially opened under Barack Obama, which accounts for 50 percent of visitors to the Caribbean area. Trump also placed Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, forcing many visitors from Europe, if they went to Cuba, to apply for visas to enter the United States. The deepening crisis and three recent failures of the entire power grid have generated negative publicity, further scaring off potential visitors, whose numbers dropped 30 percent during the first quarter compared with the same period last year, with arrivals now at 50 percent of the 2019 level.

Diaz-Canel, in the interview later broadcast to the nation, said that during his weekly visits to municipalities around the country, where he meets face to face with crowds of weary residents, he explains the solar plan as a light in the darkness and key to recovery. “We are going through a complex moment of crisis, but there are exits, there are lights, and that is what we are always explaining when we go on the road,” he said.

Government critics question why it has taken so long for the country to embrace renewables and prioritize other sectors over tourism. “Better late than never,” said retired nurse Olga Diaz in Havana, “but people for years have been saying this and suffering the consequences of inaction.”

Since Fidel Castro led the 1959 Revolution, US policymakers have consistently under-tested the country’s leaders and people. The Trump administration and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appear to have learned nothing. The green push comes at a time when the Trump administration is imposing still more sanctions targeting the hard-currency earnings needed to import goods and improve infrastructure, continuing to stoke unrest.

Diaz-Canel has repeatedly said Trump’s election is unfortunate but no surprise, and his government has been preparing for some time. He points to the solar projects as an example of “creative resistance where we do not just resist but advance…based on science and innovation.”

China is Cuba’s most important partner in that effort, and Havana has joined the Belt and Road Initiative and Energy Partnership. Chinese financing and equipment proved key as Cuba modernized communications, first authorizing mobile phones for everyone in 2008 and then the Internet a decade later. The Asian powerhouse is now stepping in, as the island nation grapples with an outdated and collapsing energy grid and a lack of hard currency to keep it running.

Toward Energy Independence

The two solar park contracts center a grand strategy to finally end Cuba’s more than century-old dependence on imported fuel, last year its biggest convertible currency expense at around $2 billion.

Fidel Castro in the 1980s hoped to build three nuclear power plants with a similar goal, sparking calls for intervention from Cuban American hard-liners in Miami and saber rattling in Washington. One plant was nearing completion when the Soviet collapse derailed the project.

A decade later, Cuba launched a search with foreign partners, including France and Spain, for offshore oil. China built a deepwater drilling rig for the campaign, the only one in the world containing less than 10 percent of US components as demanded by Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. The effort failed to discover commercially viable amounts of oil.

Years later, Raúl Castro’s government signed contracts with European companies to build solar parks and wind farms, but that initiative fell apart in face of the high cost of financing, caused in part by the US sanctions, according to businessmen and diplomats with knowledge of the negotiations.

This time is different, Cuban officials insist, stating that while they understand the public’s skepticism, the solar projects are an all-hands-on-deck affair,with finance and supplies guaranteed. “The investment process has been prioritized by the country’s leadership, and in all the provinces this investment has been prioritized…from unloading at the ports, fuel for transportation and all the logistics this large volume of merchandise requires, to clearing land and construction,” Diaz-Canel said. The government forecasts that daytime blackouts will become a bad memory by 2026 and then disappear entirely along with the country’s dependence on imported fuel as more solar storage is added and some fuel shifted to nighttime use.

There are also smaller renewable projects underway. China has “donated” four additional 35MW solar parks scheduled to open this year. Cuba’s first wind farm, again with Chinese financing and materials, is scheduled to go online in 2026. The government reported that there are now over 49,500 electric vehicles registered in Cuba, most in the capital competing for space with horse-drawn carriages, vintage US Chevrolets, Soviet built Ladas, Chinese tour buses, and a growing number of SUVs. A chain of power stations is planned across the country, with the first under construction in Havana.

Pumps pushing water into the cities and fields are increasingly solar-powered, often sourced from Germany, avoiding interruptions caused by grid outages and hurricanes. A new law mandates that private and state businesses, which consume large amounts of energy, must install renewables covering half their needs during peak daylight demand.

The government, with the support of Russia, plans to preserve what it can of the outdated power plants. The Soviet-era plants use a poor-quality domestic crude, while two newer gas-fired ones are ventures with Canadian firm Sherritt International. Some imported fuel would still flow to backup clusters of smaller diesel-fired generators installed at the turn of the century and now largely idle for lack of fuel and parts.

A Plan Hard to Stop

Details of the agreements between various Chinese state and private companies to finance and supply the solar energy parks are scarce, but what is clear is that they have the blessing of both countries’ Communist Parties and are a huge logistical challenge on the ground and high seas. To date, the project is on schedule, with the first 12 parks up and running.

“One of the contracts includes 8,000 containers; 2,200,000 panels, thousands of tons of steel, millions and millions of bolts, thousands of kilometers of cable,” Mining and Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said in a recent interview with the official Granma newspaper.

The minister’s renewable energy director, Ovel Concepción Díaz, said most of the supplies had already made their way from China to the Caribbean Island nation 8,500 miles away and were on-site at future solar parks around the country, a big job in a land short on gasoline, cement, machinery, equipment, and spare parts, and where wages are paid in depreciated pesos. “More than 1,600 structures have to be installed at each solar park to support the more than 43,000 panels, plus all the wiring, more than 290 meters of cable and more than 89,000 electrical connections.… a lot of people and institutions are working together,” Concepcion Diaz said during an interview last month with official media. “This is a work of great magnitude.”

It appears that the supposed presence of Chinese spy stations in Cuba is the new banner under which the Trump administration plans to unleash new attacks on Cuba’s ability to earn thehard currency vital to its survival.

Trump and Rubio make no secret of their desire to topple the Cuban government and drive China out of Latin America and the Caribbean, but, short of a naval blockade, they will be hard-pressed to stop Cuba’s rapid shift toward renewables and the promise they hold for its economy and people.