By Richard Stone on May 5, 2026
A U.S. blockade of oil deliveries to Cuba has contributed to power blackouts that have plunged the island nation’s communities into darkness. Angelo Mastrascusa/Anadolu via Getty Images
Cuban scientists are known for ingenuity in the face of adversity. Over the years, as U.S. sanctions coupled with government mismanagement worsened the island’s economic woes, Kalet León Monzón and his colleagues at the Center of Molecular Immunology (CIM) in Havana continued to develop and produce monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins, resorting to clever workarounds such as retrofitting old instrumentation and what he calls “nontraditional ways” of importing reagents.
But months into a de facto oil blockade imposed by the United States, CIM’s R&D director is at his wits’ end. Crippling power outages and a collapsed transportation system have forced León Monzón to put eight of CIM’s 10 current clinical trials on hold. “We’ve had no choice but to prioritize,” he says.
Cuba’s downward spiral accelerated in January, after the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro choked off oil from Cuba’s main benefactor. (As Science went to press, the U.S. signaled it would allow a Russian tanker full of crude oil to reach Cuba this week.) The U.S. government hopes the crisis will finally dislodge the island’s Communist regime. “I do believe I will have the honor of taking Cuba,” U.S. President Donald Trump told journalists this month. Cuba’s science is collateral damage. “There’s an effort to degrade everything Cuba has achieved in education and science, and send us back to the Stone Age,” says Mitchell Valdés Sosa, director of the Cuban Neurosciences Center.
Nationwide electricity blackouts lasting 20 or more hours a day are forcing doctors to triage care and putting lives at risk. At the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in Havana, “we receive the most complex neurosurgical cases in the country,” says neurosurgeon Marlon Manuel Ortiz Machín. “Surgeries must not stop; it’s sometimes a patient’s last chance.” Yet he’s been “caught in the dark” during complex operations. “All you can do is pray until the generator comes back on.”
Gail Reed, a volunteer for the U.S. nonprofit MEDICC who was in Havana last week, fears Cuba’s medical system is on the brink of collapse. “Hospitals are running out of supplies. It’s heartbreaking and unconscionable,” she says. With Cuba’s infant mortality rate rising, MEDICC is “trying to protect women with high-risk pregnancies” by installing solar panels in maternity homes, Reed says.
“We’re seeing malnourishment, people losing weight,” says Angela Garcia, executive director of Global Links, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit. Flying into Havana last month, she says, “the first thing I noticed was an acrid odor”—from burning mounds of trash that has gone uncollected because of fuel shortages.
Damage to Cuba’s vaunted biotech sector could have an outsize impact on health and the economy. The 51 enterprises that make up BioCubaFarma, a government entity, produce scores of drugs, vaccines, and reagents, many of which are exported to 77 countries. One high-profile compound is CIMAvax-EGF, an immunotherapy against lung cancer that had positive results in early clinical trials in the U.S., done in partnership with the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, CIM teamed up with the Finlay Institute of Vaccines in Havana to produce Cuba’s Soberana vaccine, which targets the virus’ spike protein and was shown to be effective. The Cuban vaccinemakers are “among the best experts in the world,” says Fabrizio Chiodo, an immunologist at the Institute of Biomolecular Chemistry near Naples, Italy, who helped design Soberana.
The successes came in spite of long-standing sanctions that made it hard for Cuban labs to obtain equipment and supplies made in the U.S. or containing 10% or more U.S.-made components. During Trump’s first term, the U.S. tightened the screws, including by adding Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. “Some companies that were our lab suppliers for 50 years were forced to stop dealing with us,” says Vicente Verez Bencomo, head of vaccines at the Finlay Institute. International collaborations are withering and research funds from abroad have largely evaporated. “The U.S. has managed to cut almost all sources of our revenue,” Valdés Sosa says. Major philanthropies now exclude Cuba; the Gates Foundation, for instance, has an antiterrorism policy that forbids spending in Cuba.
The Soberana COVID-19 vaccine is administered in a boxing gym in Havana in 2021—an example of Cuba’s homegrown biotech capacity now under strain. Fabrizio Chiodo
Airlines, no longer able to refuel on the island, have canceled many flights. “That’s how we were exporting our vaccines,” Verez Bencomo says. Some shipments continue via routes that he declined to discuss out of fear U.S. authorities would intervene. “Every time we find a way to solve a problem, after a week or two it’s blocked,” Valdés Sosa says.
Bleak as things are, key labs are maintaining a scientific pulse. Many have installed solar panels to augment backup generators and keep equipment running. To cope with fuel rationing, “we’re taking lessons learned during COVID and having people work from home,” Valdés Sosa says. Finlay bought electric bikes for staff with long commutes.
CIM, meanwhile, is continuing a phase 3 clinical trial on 400 patients in Havana for NeuroEPO plus, a recombinant human erythropoietin that has shown promise against Alzheimer’s disease. In mouse models, the drug reduced brain inflammation and neuronal death, and in a clinical trial in Cuba it improved cognitive function in people with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s, the team reported in 2023 in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy. And CIM is forging ahead with a trial, launched in January, of an antibody that inhibits an immune checkpoint protein; such drugs have transformed the treatment of some cancers in developed countries—and are far too pricey for Cuba to import. “There’s huge demand from Cuban doctors to get this drug into patients as fast as we can,” León Monzón says.
Cuba’s scientists hope to preserve what they can until better times arrive. Verez Bencomo is focusing Finlay’s energies on vaccine production at the expense of research and asking colleagues abroad whether they can offer havens to some scientists to keep projects afloat. “The future of our institute,” he says, “depends on this.”
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity