By Taylor Hinds

In their book, Stellar: A World Beyond Limits and How to Get There, our founders James Arbib and Tony Seba describe humanity’s transition from an extraction-based system of scarcity to a creation-based system on superabundance. They map out how the convergence of key technologies in energy, transportation, food, and labor will not only solve our most pressing challenges, like climate change and inequality, but open a new possibility space where we can meet the needs of every person on the planet at a fraction of today’s cost. It is the inevitable result of the technology disruptions already underway in these sectors.

Whether built from scratch or transformed from an existing city, a Stellar City is an urban environment optimized to harness the benefits of these disruptions rather than bolting them onto outdated infrastructure. Previously, we looked at how Black River, Jamaica could demonstrate this vision by building from the ground up after a hurricane, and how Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is positioning itself as a potential anchor for Stellar transformation across the continent. Next, we turn to Havana, Cuba, a place where transformation is already happening at emergency speed, in the dark.
 
The City That Shouldn’t Work

Havana is a city of around two million people that has produced, per capita, one of the most formidable concentrations of scientific and medical talent on earth. Cuba’s free education system has generated nearly three times the density of doctors of the United States or United Kingdom. Its Polo Científico, a cluster of state-of-the-art biotechnology research centres in western Havana, houses more than fifty institutions and 10,000 workers, and has produced world-first innovations including a lung cancer vaccine, a synthetic vaccine against haemophilus influenzae type B, and Heberprot-P, the only drug in the world to significantly reduce amputation rates in diabetic foot ulcers. Of the 857 medicines on Cuba’s approved national health list, 569 are produced domestically.

This is a city whose capability has been systematically prevented from meeting its potential by a combination of structural factors such as a US embargo now in its seventh decade, chronic underinvestment in physical infrastructure, a centralized economic model that constrains private initiative, and an energy system so antiquated and fragile that it has collapsed entirely six times since late 2024.

On an average day in 2025, Cuba could meet only 50 to 70 percent of its electricity needs. The grid failed nationwide in February, March, October, and December 2024, and repeatedly through 2025 and into 2026. Each collapse knocked out water pumps, refrigeration, hospitals running on scarce diesel generators, and the livelihoods of millions of people who had already lost most other economic options. In February 2026, Cuba suspended refueling for international airliners at José Martí International Airport, stating it had exhausted the country’s fuel supply.

Havana is a city cooking on wood fires at night while its scientists develop cancer vaccines by day. This contradiction is the biggest reason that Havana should go Stellar, and change the trajectory of its future forever.

Background: The US embargo and why it is escalating now

The US embargo on Cuba is the longest-running economic sanctions regime in modern history. It began in 1960 under President Eisenhower, rooted in a secret State Department memorandum that explicitly sought to bring about “hunger, desperation and overthrow of government” by denying Cuba money and supplies. President Kennedy formalized and expanded it in 1962 following Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the next three decades, the Soviet bloc absorbed much of the embargo’s impact, subsidizing Cuba with oil, trade, and aid.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba entered the “Special Period”: a near-total economic freefall. Rather than easing pressure, the US tightened it. The 1992 Torricelli Act prohibited foreign subsidiaries of US companies from trading with Cuba. The 1996 Helms-Burton Act extended the embargo’s reach to foreign firms and individuals worldwide, effectively penalizing any company that did business with Cuba regardless of nationality. The embargo has been voted against by the UN General Assembly every year since 1992, with near-universal opposition representing roughly 92 percent of the world’s population. It has never been lifted.tra
In 2015, President Obama initiated a historic thaw, reopening embassies, easing travel restrictions, and normalizing some financial transactions. It was the most significant shift in six decades. President Trump reversed course during his first term, reimposing restrictions and adding 243 new sanctions. President Biden made modest adjustments. Trump’s second term has brought the most aggressive escalation yet.

Why now? The current crisis has two triggers. First, in early January 2026, US forces intervened militarily in Venezuela, ousting President Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela had been Cuba’s primary oil supplier for two decades. With Maduro gone, those shipments stopped immediately. Second, on 29 January 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14380, declaring Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security and authorizing tariffs against any country that supplies Cuba with oil, directly or indirectly. Mexico, Cuba’s remaining major supplier, halted shipments within days under the threat of those tariffs.

The result was described by the New York Times as “the United States’ first effective blockade of Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Cuba has received no oil shipments since early January 2026. UN human rights experts condemned the executive order as “a serious violation of international law,” and the UN Secretary-General warned that the humanitarian situation could collapse without fuel. In March 2026, Cuba suffered two more complete nationwide blackouts. Tens of thousands of surgeries have been postponed. Trash collection has failed across Havana. Cuban and US officials are in active but fragile talks as of the date of this publication.

The stated US objective is regime change before the end of 2026. Cuba’s stated objective is energy sovereignty. Both, in their different ways, point to the same conclusion that whichever path this crisis takes, the fossil fuel model is over for Cuba.

Stellar Energy

Cuba’s current energy crisis has a single structural root: near-total dependence on imported fossil fuels for electricity generation, through a Soviet-era grid that has never been adequately maintained or modernized. For decades, Venezuela subsidized this dependence with cheap oil. When those shipments became unreliable, then irregular, then effectively blocked by a US executive order in early 2026 threatening tariffs against any country supplying Cuba with fuel, the system began to collapse from within.

Cuba has already decided that they are working towards energy sovereignty by beginning to install solar at a pace that has surprised even optimistic analysts. Between early 2025 and early 2026, Cuba connected 49 new solar parks to its national grid, adding more than 1,000 megawatts of capacity. Solar generation jumped from 5.8 percent to over 20 percent of total electricity in twelve months, one of the fastest renewable energy transitions ever achieved by a developing country. In February 2026, Cuba broke its own solar generation record twice in two consecutive days, reaching over 900 megawatts from photovoltaic sources alone.

Cuba’s natural endowment for this transition is exceptional. Solar irradiance across the island averages 4.9 to 5.7 kilowatt-hours per square metre per day, reaching 5.7 to 7.0 kWh in the south along the Caribbean Sea. Wind speeds across most of the country average 5.0 to 6.0 metres per second, with coastal areas exceeding 7.0 m/s at height. Cuban experts have identified 32 zones of strong wind potential, with a mapped gross theoretical capacity far exceeding current domestic demand. 

The missing piece, and it is critical, is battery storage. Of the 55 solar parks planned for 2025, only four were equipped with storage systems. Solar produces energy when demand is lowest. Peak electricity demand in Cuba falls between 7 and 8 p.m., after sunset. Without large-scale battery storage, solar parks cannot prevent the cascading nighttime grid failures that have defined this crisis. A true Stellar Energy system for Havana is the only viable path forward. Solar, Wind, and Battery systems function as stocks rather than flows, once built, they generate electricity at near-zero marginal cost with no fuel imports required. This means completing the solar buildout and layering in the battery storage and wind power generation that transforms intermittent generation into reliable, 24-hour SWB Superpower. A completed Stellar energy system renders the oil blockade economically irrelevant. Cuba’s own energy minister has said as much explicitly, framing the solar buildout as energy sovereignty and a direct counter to the blockade’s central mechanism. That is absolutely technically achievable. The bigger obstacles are geopolitical, not technological. 

Stellar Transportation

Cuba spends a significant share of its scarce foreign currency importing vehicles and fuel for transport. The current crisis has made this particularly visible. In early 2026, collection trucks across Havana ran out of fuel, leaving refuse to pile up on the streets of the capital as the country’s fuel reserves were directed to essential services.

Stellar Transportation eliminates this problem entirely. A Transportation-as-a-Service based system made up of autonomous electric vehicle fleets would be powered by the same Stellar Energy system that ends fossil fuel dependence for electricity and would be four to ten times cheaper per mile to operate than private car ownership and used far more efficiently.

Havana is famous for its fleet of mid-century American cars, sustained for decades through ingenuity and scarcity rather than design, represents a population with extraordinary mechanical skill and a deep cultural relationship with maintenance and adaptation. That adaptive capacity is a genuine asset for a transformation that will require installation, maintenance, and local problem-solving at scale.

A SWB-powered electric transport network in Havana through electrified TaaS fleets would break the city’s dependence on fuel imports for mobility as decisively as solar breaks its dependence on fuel imports for electricity. The two transitions are inseparable. Energy comes first, and then the transport follows at near-zero marginal cost.

Stellar Food

Cuba’s food crisis is as acute as its energy crisis, and the two are deeply entangled. The country currently imports around 80 percent of its food, a structural vulnerability that embargoes and sanctions have repeatedly weaponized. Cuba once produced millions of tonnes of sugar annually, the crop that defined its economy for a century. In the 2024 to 2025 harvest season, production fell below 150,000 tonnes, the lowest in more than a hundred years, with only six of fourteen planned mills operational, their machinery unable to function without the fuel and spare parts that the blockade had cut off.

A Stellar Food system centered around Precision Fermentation offers Cuba the profound ability to produce high-quality proteins locally, at scale, independent of land availability, imported animal feed, fertilizers, or the global supply chains that embargo and geography have made unreliable. Precision fermentation is up to 100 times more land-efficient than conventional animal agriculture, requires no imported feed, and can be powered by the same cheap electricity that a fully built SWB system generates.

Cuba has a specific and extraordinary advantage here. Its biotechnology sector, centered in Havana’s Polo Científico, already has world-class expertise in fermentation, microbiology, and the production of biological compounds at industrial scale. The same scientific infrastructure that produces cancer vaccines and wound-healing biologics is directly applicable to precision fermentation of proteins. This is not a capability Cuba would need to import. It already exists, sitting in laboratories that are currently running on generators during blackouts, waiting for a stable energy system to unlock their full potential.

Sugarcane, even in its current diminished state, remains Cuba’s most abundant agricultural crop and the perfect feedstock for precision fermentation. Instead of burning or exporting raw sugar, Cuba could convert that crop into high-value proteins locally, creating a food system that is genuinely decoupled from global supply chains. The SWB Superpower that a completed solar, wind and battery buildout would provide is the electricity and heat that fermentation facilities require. Waste heat from co-located data centers or industrial operations could also power fermentation tanks, maximizing efficiency in exactly the way a Stellar Economy is designed to function.

Stellar Labor

Cuba’s most underappreciated asset is its people. An estimated two million Cubans have left the island since the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by deteriorating living conditions and the relentless pressure of the energy crisis. The population that remains is aging. The exodus of younger professionals, drawn away by the same crisis that Stellar technologies could solve, is one of the most urgent challenges a Stellar transformation would need to address.

Stellar Labor liberates human potential by automating physical and cognitive drudgery, freeing people to do work that is genuinely creative, meaningful, valuable and necessarily human. In Havana’s case, the human capital that would power this transformation already exists in abundance. Cuba produces doctors, engineers, biotechnologists, and scientists at rates that most countries cannot match. What it lacks is the energy, the tools, and the economic conditions to put that talent to work at full capacity.

The introduction of AI and humanoid robotics into Cuba’s manufacturing and agricultural sectors, enabled by cheap SWB electricity, would allow the island to leapfrog the labour-intensive industrialization model that it has never been able to fully build, and go directly to a high-productivity system that its educated workforce is already positioned to operate and maintain.

A Stellar City

Havana sits at a dramatic rupture point. The geopolitical constraints that have suppressed its development for six decades, the isolation from Western financial systems, the embargo that has prevented the technology and investment that cities elsewhere take for granted are the precise conditions that make the Stellar transformation both attractive and existential.

The Stellar framework is especially powerful when applied to cities that have no viable path forward under the old model and must find a new one. Havana cannot continue importing oil that a hostile power can cut off at will. It cannot continue importing 80 percent of its food through supply chains that sanctions routinely disrupt. It cannot continue running a biotechnology sector of global significance on a Soviet-era grid that collapses after sunset. The old system is broken beyond repair.

The path to a Stellar Havana is not smooth and the governance challenges are real. Cuba is a centralized state that has historically been slow to allow the private sector innovation that precision fermentation and distributed energy would require. It is also entrenched in a political situation of acute uncertainty as the US and Cuba engage in what officials have called a very sensitive dialogue, and an economic crisis so severe that the investment required for full SWB buildout cannot come from domestic sources alone. The battery storage gap remains the most urgent technical constraint. 

But Havana is already starting on the Stellar path and racing towards the stars. It is deploying solar at emergency speed. Its scientists are still in their laboratories and its engineers are keeping a broken grid running. Stellar energy at least is already the city’s survival strategy.

The ultimate promise of a Stellar City is a world where we no longer just survive but thrive. Havana is vivid proof that survival and transformation are, in the right conditions, the same thing.