Cuba has suffered its third nationwide power outage since the start of the year, according to the state electricity company. The impoverished island was already struggling to keep the lights on before the US president, Donald Trump, imposed an oil blockade in January, which has depleted the already dwindling supply of fuel for Cuba’s power plants. The UNE power utility wrote on X that there has been a total disconnection from the national electricity generation system, and is investigating the causes. Living like this is agony, said Meyboll Font, a 51-year-old self-employed social media community manager. Font said that her Havana neighbourhood has been surviving on just three or four hours of power a day but that the blackout was worse because you never know when it will return.
The blackout is the eighth on the island of 9.6 million people since late 2024. The state has imposed increasingly draconian power cuts across the country – over 24 hours at a stretch in parts of Havana and over 70 hours in some rural areas – in an increasingly desperate attempt to conserve fuel. Power outages have been a feature of life for years on the communist-run island, where the electricity generation system, composed mainly of ageing Soviet-era plants, is in shambles.
The pace of blackouts has accelerated since the fuel blockade began, however, with authorities citing a lack of fuel to run the generators that support the creaking national grid. Since January, Washington has only allowed one oil tanker, from Russia, to dock in Cuba. The blockade, coupled with a flurry of sanctions on the Cuban state and foreign companies that do business with it, have tipped the country closer to the brink of collapse.
Food, drinking water and medicine are in increasingly short supply, prompting the UN to warn of a humanitarian emergency. The government has invested heavily in solar energy to try to alleviate the electricity shortages but solar power, while increasing, still represents just 10% of the energy mix.
