Rolling blackouts. A worthless currency. A once-mighty industry on life support. Doctors, engineers and students leaving in droves in search of a future. That all sounds like Venezuela, but I’m talking about Cuba.

As Venezuela’s crisis deepens, another — quieter but just as dangerous — is unfolding just 90 miles from Florida. The drama may be smaller, but the danger is real. If Venezuela is wobbling, Cuba is starting to fall.

On Sept. 10, Cuba’s entire electrical grid failed, plunging nearly 10 million people into darkness. It was the island’s fourth nationwide blackout in less than a year. Even before that, much of the country was losing power for half the day. Officials blamed machinery; Cubans blamed the system.

The country’s energy network has become a patchwork of corroded plants and emergency repairs. Over the past 14 months, it has suffered a dozen nationwide outages. Years of neglect and the burning of high-sulfur crude have crippled its power stations. As U.S. sanctions tighten on Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s ability to keep its ally supplied with oil has withered.

Fuel shipments from Venezuela — Havana’s economic lifeline for two decades — now fluctuate wildly, sometimes dropping below 10,000 barrels a day before rebounding. Russia and Mexico have stepped in with emergency cargoes, but neither offers stability. Without steady deliveries, plants sputter and nights become suffocating. In some towns, residents cook by candlelight, charge phones at work, and sleep on rooftops to escape the heat.

The currency collapse has ground down daily life. Even average state salaries amount to less than $20 a month at the informal exchange rate, far below the cost of living. Gasoline is scarce and ruinously expensive. In rural areas, bicycles and horse carts have replaced cars. Tourism, once the island’s economic engine, has fallen by more than half over the last decade. Even middle-class Havana now endures rolling blackouts, empty shelves, and rising petty crime.

The peso trades near 400 to the dollar on the street, its weakest rate on record. Prices for staples climb relentlessly, and stores selling imported goods increasingly demand hard currency that most Cubans cannot earn. The result is a two-tiered economy that mirrors Venezuela’s descent into dollarization, where access to dollars — not work, skill or effort — determines who eats well and who doesn’t.

Cuba’s signature crop has fared no better. This year’s sugar harvest is expected to fall below 200,000 tons, the lowest since the 1800s. In the 1980s, sugar harvests topped 8 million. Today, Cuba is importing raw sugar, a stunning reversal for a former agricultural superpower. The collapse gutted exports, weakened the peso and idled thousands of rural workers.

The losses aren’t just economic. Over the last four years, roughly two million Cubans — nearly 20 percent of the island’s population — have fled. Hospitals lack doctors, universities lack professors, and small businesses lack skilled workers. Families are scattered, classrooms empty, innovation stalled. What appears to be a pressure valve for the regime is really a slow bleed of the nation’s lifeblood.

The parallels with Venezuela are unmistakable. Both regimes chose political control over prosperity. Both leaned on external lifelines — oil, credit, remittances — that are now fraying. Both crush dissent when policy fails. Venezuela’s decay hollowed out a once-rich state. Cuba has the same script, only with a much larger arc and without the oil money.

The Havana-Caracas partnership has always been more than transactional. For a quarter century, the two governments have portrayed themselves as revolutionary brothers defying U.S. power. The bond dates back to Hugo Chávez’s rise in 1999 and his admiration for Fidel Castro’s revolution four decades earlier. Cuba sent doctors, teachers, and security advisers; Venezuela paid in oil. Even today, as both regimes falter, each remains the other’s last dependable ally in a region that has largely moved on.

Their bond, however, is finally fraying. Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba have collapsed, from roughly 56,000 barrels per day in 2023 to as few as 8,000 in June 2025. Havana still provides diplomatic cover for Maduro, but both governments are now propping each other up with diminishing strength — two exhausted revolutions clinging to the same fading ideology.

In both countries, force has replaced persuasion. Independent journalists are jailed, critics harassed, and citizens whisper their frustrations in private. Once-proud social programs — universal education and health care — have decayed and are now mere shells of what they once were. All that remains are schools without teachers, hospitals without medicine, clinics without electricity.

Meanwhile, Washington is again engaged in a high-stakes game in the Caribbean. U.S. warships patrol off Venezuela and have destroyed vessels suspected of smuggling narcotics — a show of force meant to pressure Maduro.

Cuban dissident and former political prisoner Óscar Biscet sees the regimes as intertwined. “Cuba and Venezuela are twin dictatorships that sustain each other through corruption and transnational crime,” he told me. “The communist Castro regime effectively occupies Venezuela’s political and military institutions and uses them to export repression and to traffic drugs to the United States.”

Formally, President Miguel Díaz-Canel leads Cuba. In reality, decisions still flow from a small cadre of aging revolutionaries — Raúl Castro, now 93, and a few longtime comrades in their nineties. Power moves through personal networks rather than institutions. Preservation, not renewal, is the guiding rule. Across the island, billboards still trumpet “Continuity.” For most Cubans, that no longer means stability — it means continued suffocation.

To be sure, Cuba is not Venezuela. Its security forces remain disciplined. Tourism and remittances still bring in dollars that Caracas can only envy. Emigration keeps anger from boiling over. And the Communist Party has survived so many shocks that it is always risky to forecast its collapse.

But the warning signs aren’t hard to see. The lights keep flickering. The peso buys less every day. The sugar mills are quiet. The young are leaving. The pillars that once held Cuban socialism upright are giving way all at once.

Venezuela’s collapse dominates the headlines, but Cuba’s slow-motion breakdown could have far more profound consequences. A failed state just 90 miles from Florida would unleash new migration waves, invite rival powers into the region, and test America’s resolve. Havana’s flickering lights may be the hemisphere’s next alarm bell.

Daniel Allott is the former opinion editor of The Hill and the author of “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Country.”