Eleven Million in Darkness

What’s happening

Cuba’s national electrical grid suffered a complete collapse on March 16, the third island-wide blackout in four months. Eleven million people lost power. By Monday evening, electricity had been restored to just two percent of Havana.

The collapse follows three months without oil shipments. Venezuela’s supply was severed after the U.S. arrested its president in January. President Trump warned of tariffs on any country providing Cuba with fuel. Mexico paused shipments. The island’s aging infrastructure, held together by what one expert called "magician" technicians, finally gave way. Surgeries for tens of thousands have been postponed. Water pumps are inoperable. Food spoils without refrigeration. Tomas David Velazquez Felipe, 61, said: "What little we have to eat spoils. Our people are too old to keep suffering." On the same day, President Trump called Cuba "very weakened" and said he believed he would have "the honor of taking Cuba."

What the text says

The ninth plague in Exodus is darkness. God commands Moses to stretch out his hand, and a darkness descends over Egypt so thick the text says it could be felt.

Exodus 10:21-2321Yahweh said to Moses, "Stretch out your hand toward the sky, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt."22Moses stretched forth his hand toward the sky, and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days.23They didn't see one another, neither did anyone rise from his place for three days; but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.

The Hebrew word for this darkness is choshek, the same word used in Genesis 1:2 for the primordial void before creation. This is more than nightfall. It is un-creation. The ordered world reverting to chaos.

In the Exodus narrative, darkness is a judgment on power. Pharaoh controlled the largest economy in the ancient world, commanded armies, and built monuments to himself. The plague strips all of it away. No one can see. No one can move. No one can work. The entire apparatus of empire is rendered useless by the absence of light.

The text draws a distinction that matters: the Israelites, the enslaved and vulnerable, had light where they lived. Darkness fell on the powerful. The oppressed were spared.

The pattern in Exodus is specific. When God judges, the weight falls upward, onto those who wield power. When darkness falls downward, onto the elderly, the sick, the hungry, the text has a different word for it. Injustice.

The reflection

Eleven million people cannot see. Surgeries are postponed. Food rots. Water pumps are silent. A 71-year-old woman gives away her soup before it spoils. And a man who holds more power than any Pharaoh says he might "take" the island.

Exodus insists that darkness has a direction. It falls on those who hoard power. When the pattern reverses, when the weakest bear the weight of an engineered blackout, the text asks who turned out the lights, and why they still have power.