Cuba’s aging power grid failed early Thursday morning, plunging the island’s eastern half into darkness and leaving millions without electricity as a chronic fuel shortage collided with broken infrastructure. The state-run Electric Union said the collapse disconnected all provinces from Guantánamo east of Havana through Ciego de Ávila, but gave no timeline for restoration. In the capital, residents endured blackouts that had already run for 24 straight hours by midday.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel had warned a day earlier that the energy picture was “tense.” Supplies from a Russian fuel tanker that arrived in late March had been exhausted, and a second tanker that left the Baltic port of Vysotsk in January has been stationary in the Atlantic Ocean for weeks, according to Russian news reports. Cuba produces less than half of the fuel it consumes, leaving the grid acutely vulnerable to any disruption in imports.
The economic squeeze has been compounded by Washington. President Donald Trump in January threatened tariffs on any nation supplying oil to Cuba and has conditioned sanctions relief on the Cuban government’s release of political prisoners and movement toward political and economic liberalization. The Cuban government routinely blames U.S. sanctions for the island’s energy woes, while critics argue that decades of underinvestment and mismanagement are the deeper cause.
On Wednesday evening, AP journalists saw residents in multiple Havana neighborhoods take to the streets, banging pots and pans and lighting trash cans on fire to protest the prolonged outages. Hours later, Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy appeared on state television and described the energy situation as “critical.” The protests, though small, were a rare public display of frustration in a country where dissent is tightly controlled.
The human toll is mounting. The blackouts have forced businesses to cut operating hours, left households unable to refrigerate food, and in some cases prompted hospitals to cancel non-emergency surgeries. With no clear date for the grid’s repair and oil deliveries uncertain, the crisis is poised to deepen.