Cuba: A Country Running Out of Slack

When I was managing large projects, we always budgeted for two things: contingency and reserves.

Contingency funds were there because unexpected things happened. A supplier missed a delivery. Equipment failed. A technical problem took longer than anticipated. Experience teaches you that even the best plans encounter surprises.

Reserves served a different purpose. They existed because we knew our planning was imperfect. Requirements change. Priorities shift. New information emerges. Sometimes the project itself evolves in ways nobody anticipated at the beginning.

In many projects, we consumed a significant portion of the contingency budget. That was normal. The surprises arrived as expected.

But we rarely touched the reserves. When we did, it usually meant the project had changed in a fundamental way.

The lesson was simple: successful systems need slack.

Without contingency and reserves, every unexpected event becomes a crisis. With them, problems remain manageable.

The same principle applies far beyond project management. Families maintain savings accounts. Businesses maintain inventories and cash reserves. Utilities maintain backup generation capacity. Hospitals maintain surge capacity. Nations maintain strategic reserves of food, fuel, and critical materials.

Slack often appears inefficient—until the day it becomes essential.

Recently, I have been reading about Cuba, and it struck me as an example of what happens when multiple forms of slack begin disappearing at the same time.

For decades, Cuba has faced economic challenges. What appears different today is not any single problem, but the number of systems showing signs of strain simultaneously.

Consider energy.

Large portions of Cuba’s electrical infrastructure were built decades ago. Maintaining aging power plants has become increasingly difficult as equipment, replacement parts, and fuel have become harder to obtain. The result has been recurring blackouts affecting large portions of the country. When reserve capacity shrinks, routine equipment failures can quickly become widespread disruptions.

Food presents a similar story.

A nation can often absorb a poor harvest, a transportation bottleneck, or a temporary disruption in imports. The challenge becomes far greater when several of these occur together and continue over time. Cuba has struggled with agricultural productivity, fuel shortages affecting transportation, weather-related impacts, and limited access to foreign currency needed for imports. Each problem reinforces the others.

Infrastructure tells the same story.

Roads, housing, water systems, electrical networks, and public facilities rarely collapse overnight. Instead, years of deferred maintenance accumulate until routine repairs become major undertakings. Eventually, systems become less reliable and more expensive to sustain.

Yet energy, food, and infrastructure problems can often be repaired. Demographic problems are much harder to reverse.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have left the country, many of them younger and working-age adults. When people leave, they take more than labor with them. They take skills, entrepreneurship, tax revenue, and future leadership. The remaining population becomes older, increasing demands on healthcare and public services while reducing the workforce available to support them.

Even education, once considered one of Cuba’s great strengths, has begun to show signs of stress. Literacy remains high, but schools face many of the same challenges affecting other institutions: teacher shortages, limited resources, and the loss of skilled professionals who seek opportunities elsewhere.

These pressures are increasingly visible in daily life.

Periodic protests and public expressions of frustration have emerged in recent years, often triggered by power outages, food shortages, inflation, and declining living conditions. The protests themselves are not the root problem. Rather, they are evidence that the cumulative effects of multiple stresses are being felt across a broad segment of the population.

People, like systems, can absorb only so much disruption before the strain becomes visible.

What makes Cuba particularly interesting is that it possesses several advantages that many countries would envy. It occupies a strategic location near major shipping routes and close to one of the world’s largest economies. It has a rich culture, an educated population, attractive tourist destinations, and a long history of resilience.

Yet geography alone does not guarantee success.

A favorable location may create opportunities, but those opportunities still require functioning systems, adequate resources, and enough reserve capacity to absorb inevitable setbacks.

The broader lesson extends far beyond Cuba.

Complex systems rarely fail because of a single event. More often, they become vulnerable because they gradually lose the reserves that once allowed them to recover from mistakes, surprises, and bad luck.

When contingency disappears, every problem becomes urgent.

When reserves disappear, every setback becomes more difficult to overcome.

And when enough forms of slack vanish at the same time, the symptoms begin appearing everywhere: blackouts become more common, infrastructure deteriorates, skilled workers leave, shortages become harder to manage, and public frustration grows.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson Cuba offers today—not about politics or ideology, but about the value of maintaining enough margin to withstand the unexpected.

The systems we depend upon are often stronger than we realize. But they are also more dependent on hidden reserves than most of us understand.

In a project, once contingency is exhausted and reserves are consumed, the organization can still redefine the project, shrink the scope, or abandon it altogether. A nation has far fewer escape hatches. People still need electricity, food, transportation, healthcare, and functioning institutions.

That is what makes Cuba’s situation so concerning. When enough forms of slack disappear at the same time, recovery becomes difficult without new resources. Blackouts, shortages, emigration, infrastructure decay, and public frustration are not isolated problems; they are signs that the country’s ability to absorb shocks has been steadily eroding.

Cuba may eventually stabilize, but it is hard to see that happening through internal adjustment alone. Significant outside assistance, investment, trade, or financial support will likely be required. The unanswered questions are how much help will be needed, who will provide it, and what degree of dependence will come with that help.

Perhaps the most important lesson is not that systems fail when a crisis arrives. They fail because the reserves that once made recovery possible have already been consumed.