📊 Cuban Crowds, Spirit Airlines, and Berkshire Hathaway

Havana rallies, carrier shutdown, and Omaha meeting.

May 03, 2026

Greetings! Happy Free Comic Book Day to those celebrating.

Let’s get into today’s top stories.

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🌎 GLOBAL NEWS

🇨🇺 Cuba celebrates the workers keeping lights alive. Cuba’s May Day rally put labor praise beside national exhaustion. Tens of thousands gathered along Havana’s seawall Friday to cheer workers. Employees of Cuba’s Electric Union work 24 hours a day, but the grid is still crumbling. Islandwide outages continue. Gasoline shortages have worsened the pressure. Electric Union accountant Yunier Meriño Reyes called the moment difficult. He said workers are making a relentless day-and-night effort. Cuba’s power crisis deepened after America attacked Venezuela in January. That halted critical oil shipments from Caracas. President Trump later threatened tariffs on countries selling or providing oil to Cuba. The island then went more than three months without a single oil shipment. A Russian tanker carrying 730K barrels finally docked in late March. Before that, Cuba relied on natural gas, limited solar power, and aging thermoelectric plants. The rally was about celebration, and honored workers trying to keep an electrical system from becoming national darkness.

🇲🇽 Mexico City sinks in plain sight. Mexico City is sinking so quickly that scientists can see it from space. New international satellite imagery shows the capital dropping nearly 10 inches a year. That is about 25 centimeters annually. The city is one of the world’s fastest-subsiding metropolises. It is also one of the largest. The greater urban area covers about 3,000 square miles. It holds roughly 22M people. The historical explanation is underneath everyone’s feet. Mexico City was built on an ancient lake bed. Many downtown streets were once canals. Groundwater pumping has shrunk the aquifer for more than a century. Urban development has accelerated the stress. Older buildings and monuments already tilt visibly. The Metropolitan Cathedral began construction in 1573 and now carries that slow geological insult. Researcher Enrique Cabral says the damage reaches the subway, drainage, water systems, housing, and streets. The problem is not only sinking land. It is a water crisis slowly dragging the megacity downward while the city keeps drinking from below.

🇺🇸 LOCAL NEWS

✈️ Spirit’s discount revolution runs out of runway. Spirit Airlines is shutting down after 34 years. The bright yellow upstart once turned air travel into an à la carte wager. It promised bare fares. It charged for almost everything else. The model was mocked, copied, and eventually absorbed by the industry it annoyed. Now it is over. Spirit said Saturday it had started an orderly wind-down effective immediately. All flights have been canceled. Customer service is no longer available. The airline once operated hundreds of daily flights. It employed about 17K people. It had already gone bankrupt twice. This time, the company said higher oil prices made survival impossible. Those prices have risen because of the war with Iran. Passengers arrived at airports to find flights gone. Workers learned overnight that their jobs were gone too. Spirit’s collapse is not just an airline story. It is what happens when a low-price business model meets a fuel shock it cannot upsell its way around.

🥫 Food stamp rolls fall by 4.3M. Nearly 4.3M fewer Americans received food stamps in January 2026 than in January 2025. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins framed the drop as a victory over fraud and dependence. Experts say the story is less flattering. They point instead to new requirements created by last summer’s Republican tax and spending cut bill. That law made the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) harder to access. The Congressional Budget Office projected it would cut $186B from SNAP over 10 years. That is a 20% reduction. Cornell University assistant professor Roger Figueroa studies food insecurity. He said the participation decline appears tied to access barriers. Fraud does not explain the scale. In fiscal year 2023, 41,476 people were disqualified from SNAP for fraud. That was fewer than 1% of more than 42M participants. So the headline number is real. The explanation is the fight. A smaller safety net can be called efficiency. It can also be called exclusion by paperwork. For hungry households, the label matters less than the missing groceries.

🗂️ MISC

💼 Berkshire learns to speak without Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting entered its post-Warren Buffett era Saturday. The change was visible immediately. The old folksy wisdom and jokes gave way to detailed business discussion led by new CEO Greg Abel. The crowd was smaller. The arena was a little over half full. That is down sharply from the more than 40K people who once filled Omaha for Buffett and Charlie Munger. Still, no other corporate meeting quite looks like Berkshire’s “Woodstock for Capitalists”. Buffett remains chairman, and made a few comments during the meeting. Abel opened with tribute, and announced that jerseys bearing Buffett’s and Munger’s names would hang in the arena rafters. Berkshire’s businesses took center stage. So did the Iran war. Vice Chairman Ajit Jain said Berkshire would insure ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz if the price was right and the American Navy provided escorts. Abel said oil volatility is challenging Berkshire’s companies. The meeting felt less like a farewell than a transfer of operating grammar.

🏇 Golden Tempo makes Derby history. Golden Tempo won the Kentucky Derby and changed racing history with one stretch run. Trainer Cherie DeVaux became the first woman to train a Derby winner. She had spent the week answering questions about that possibility. Then the horse answered for her. Golden Tempo charged from the back of the pack. Jockey Jose Ortiz navigated past 17 horses around the final turn. He passed favorite Renegade just before the wire. The crowd at Churchill Downs was more than 100K. The race was the 152nd Kentucky Derby. Golden Tempo won the 1 1/4-mile race in 2:02.27. The odds were 23-1. Ortiz won the Derby on his 11th try. DeVaux won it in her first attempt. She started her own stable eight years ago. She is only the second female trainer to win any Triple Crown race. Jena Antonucci was the first, with Arcangelo in the 2023 Belmont Stakes. DeVaux said she was glad to represent women everywhere. The sport got its usual pageantry, and a new first.