Cuba’s power grid collapsed Saturday, leaving the country without electricity for the third time in March, the Cuban Electric Union announced as authorities worked to restore power, according to an update reported by the Associated Press. The union initially reported a total blackout across the island without saying what caused the outage, but it later said the shutdown began after an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey province.
In a statement carried by AP, the Ministry of Energy and Mines described the sequence that followed the initial failure, saying “a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online.” The ministry said it then activated “micro-islands” — smaller groupings of generating units — to keep power flowing to vital centers, including hospitals and water systems, while the wider grid remained down.
Authorities said they were restoring service after the second islandwide blackout in the span of days. AP reported that the last nationwide blackout occurred on Monday, and that Saturday’s outage came after the country had already experienced another blackout earlier in the week.
Cuba’s government has linked broader electricity problems to both the state of its infrastructure and the availability of fuel. Power outages, whether nationwide or regional, have become relatively common in the last two years, with officials pointing to breakdowns in the aging grid. Those failures have been compounded by daily blackouts lasting up to 12 hours, which Cuba’s officials have attributed to fuel shortages that also destabilize the system.
The repeated shutdowns have consequences for daily life and essential services. AP reported that the outages reduce work hours, prevent cooking and cause food spoilage when refrigerators stop working, and in some cases have led hospitals to cancel surgeries.
Díaz-Canel has also said Cuba is operating without oil deliveries it otherwise would receive from foreign suppliers. AP reported that the president said the island has not received oil from foreign suppliers for three months and that Cuba produces barely 40% of the fuel it needs to power its economy.
The Cuban government has blamed the outages partly on a U.S.-imposed energy pressure campaign, including after Donald Trump warned in January of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba. AP reported that the Trump administration’s stated conditions for lifting sanctions include Cuba releasing political prisoners and moving toward political and economic liberalization, and it also raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba.”
AP also reported that Cuba’s fuel shortages have been worsened by the removal of Venezuela’s leader, which it said halted critical petroleum shipments from the ally that had long helped supply Havana. As the latest blackout unfolded, officials said they were trying to bring the system back online after the generating failure and cascading collapse described by Cuba’s energy ministry.
Cuba has faced growing strain on its power system amid the outages, with the government citing both material aging and external pressures. In recent months, the country has also reported repeated grid failures that underscore the difficulty of stabilizing power when fuel supplies remain tight.