Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
HAVANA — Cuba has indefinitely postponed the 26th annual Festival del Habano, the Caribbean island’s premier gathering of international cigar millionaires, citing a desire to maintain its “highest standards of quality, excellence, and experience.” These standards appear to require electricity, aviation fuel, and functioning infrastructure, standards that the rest of Cuba also lacks.
The festival, which had been scheduled for February 24-27, was to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cohiba brand, arguably the world’s most famous cigar. The week-long event typically draws over a thousand guests from 80 countries for plantation tours, seminars on tobacco curing, and a gala dinner where hand-carved humidors sell for the GDP of a small municipality.
This photo is clearly not from a past gala dinner. (Bryan Ledgard/Flickr)
The cancellation comes as Cuba endures its worst energy crisis since 1991 when the Soviet Union stopped returning calls. Blackouts now routinely exceed 20 hours per day in the provinces. Havana’s Fifth Avenue, once the kind of boulevard that makes European tourists feel underdressed, is now so dark that EFE news crews described it as a city operating in slow motion, with garbage piling up on sidewalks because the collection trucks have no diesel.
The immediate cause of the energy collapse is straightforward, if you consider anything currently going on in geopolitics to be straightforward anymore. After American forces seized President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, the Trump administration ordered Venezuela’s interim government to stop supplying oil to Cuba, which amounted to roughly 60 percent of Cuba’s daily crude imports. President Trump then pledged tariffs on any country that ships oil to the island, which is the geopolitical equivalent of not only taking someone’s lunch but also threatening to punch anyone who even gives them a sandwich.
Cuba responded to the crisis with emergency austerity measures, including a four-day government workweek, fuel rationing for essential sectors only, and a formal announcement that the country could no longer provide aviation fuel to foreign airlines. Air France now refuels somewhere else in the Caribbean. Air Canada suspended service entirely. Even Russia, which made a public show of announcing oil shipments to Havana, quietly said it would stop flying commercial routes to the island once Russian tourists were safely home.
Last year’s gala was held with a ceremony inside Havana’s restored National Capitol, one so extravagant that it provoked a public backlash that crashed local social media. While 1,400 international guests sipped under gilded chandeliers with entertainment by Earth, Wind & Fire, the country’s electricity deficit that same evening was 1,641 megawatts. And this year things are much worse.
Habanos S.A., the state-run monopoly that controls global Cuban cigar sales, has not announced a new date. The company’s official statement stated that the postponement was to protect the festival’s “prestige”, which is technically true in the same way that canceling a pool party because the house is on fire protects the integrity of the cannonball competition.
The UN has warned that Cuba faces potential humanitarian “collapse” if oil supplies aren’t restored, a warning that feels redundant when the country has already told foreign airlines they can’t refuel, and the streetlights are off. The exchange rate has blown past 500 Cuban pesos to the dollar. The gas station lines that used to last days now last weeks, and the ones that sold diesel have simply closed, which is certainly one way to solve the line problem.
The Cohiba brand will have to celebrate its 60th anniversary some other time, perhaps when there is electricity, or at least a way for the guests to get home afterward.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
