Cuba's Grid Collapsed for the Sixth Time This Year, Shutting Off Power to the Entire Island
The state electric utility said the national system went down late Sunday, leaving about 10 million people in the dark. Crews began reconnecting circuits on Monday.
Cuba's national electricity grid collapsed late Sunday, plunging the island of roughly 10 million people into darkness in what the state-run Electric Union called a total loss of the system — the sixth nationwide failure of 2026 and the eleventh since late 2024.
The utility, known as UNE, announced the collapse on social media and said it had begun the slow work of rebuilding the grid from isolated generating "microsystems" outward. Power started returning in patches on Monday. Havana had already been reporting rolling problems before the failure: damaged transformers, circuit faults and scheduled cuts imposed because the country simply could not generate enough electricity to meet demand.
July was worse than any month this year. The grid went down three times in nine days, including two island-wide failures in the same week. Each collapse follows a similar pattern — a single thermoelectric plant trips offline, the remaining plants cannot absorb the load, and the system cascades into darkness within minutes.
The underlying problem is physical and it has been building for years. Cuba's thermoelectric plants are old, several of them more than three decades in service, and they have run with limited maintenance and without a reliable supply of replacement parts. Fuel is the other half of the equation. Havana has struggled to import crude since January, when it lost its access to Venezuelan oil following the U.S. capture of President Nicolás Maduro, its closest political and energy ally in the hemisphere. Mexico, which had supplied some cargoes, halted exports under U.S. pressure.
The Cuban government blames the oil blockade President Donald Trump imposed on January 3 for the crisis. Critics inside and outside the country point instead to decades of underinvestment and mismanagement in the energy sector, arguing the plants were headed toward failure regardless of who was shipping the fuel. Both explanations describe the same machinery: a grid with almost no margin, where the loss of one unit takes down the whole thing.
For ordinary Cubans the consequences run well past inconvenience. Extended outages have disrupted public transportation, shut down water pumping stations, knocked out communications, interrupted medical services and spoiled refrigerated food during the hottest stretch of the Caribbean summer. Residents in Havana and provincial cities have taken to cooking with charcoal during the longest blackouts. Protests over power cuts and food shortages have flared periodically over the past two years, and the government has responded with a mix of rationing schedules and appeals for patience.
UNE has not given a firm timeline for full restoration, saying only that generation would be added progressively as units come back online.
Originally reported by Al Jazeera.