Cuba Power Grid Collapsed Again, Leaving Millions in the Dark

The Cuba power grid collapsed again on Friday afternoon. Just before 2 p.m. local time, the island's national electrical system went down, and millions of people lost power in a matter of moments. The Ministry of Energy and Mines announced the failure on X, posting that a "total disconnection of the electrical system" had occurred and that recovery protocols were already being activated.

The first hours of the Cuba power grid failure were brutal. By sunset, officials said electricity had returned to only about 5 percent of users in Havana, with most of the capital still sitting in darkness. According to the grid operator UNE, limited service came back first on priority circuits near hospitals and water pumping stations, while the rest of the island kept waiting.

Officials traced the failure to a fault in high-voltage transmission lines, with unstable weather making the situation worse. A senior UNE official said crews were working on a gradual restoration plan, but gave no timeline for full recovery. The exact sequence that brought the grid down is still under investigation, and the work of reconnecting the island continued into Saturday.

A grid running on fumes

This was not an isolated breakdown. Friday's collapse of the Cuba power grid is at least the sixth nationwide outage the country has suffered this year, according to the Associated Press, and the twelfth since late 2024. Three of them hit in July alone. Africa Eye, which has been tracking the outages, counts it as the seventh nationwide failure this year. Even when the grid holds together, Cubans live with rolling cuts that can stretch past 30 hours in Havana and more than 60 hours in some provinces.

The Cuba power grid has become a shorthand for the country's wider crisis. Every failure hits hospitals, schools, small businesses and street vendors that have no generators to fall back on, and each recovery costs fuel the island barely has.

The island's power plants are old, and the equipment keeping them running is largely obsolete. Spare parts are hard to come by, and the fuel situation has been critical since January, when US restrictions tightened on Cuba's energy imports. The AP reported that only one Russian fuel tanker has reached the island since then, arriving in March. Without steady fuel, the Cuba power grid cannot keep its aging thermal plants online, and each plant taken offline for maintenance puts more load on the ones still running.

The state utility UNE has said limited fuel makes the grid more fragile and complicates every restoration effort, because backup generators cannot run long without diesel. Every collapse puts deeper strain on an already worn-out system, and every recovery starts from a weaker baseline.

What the blackout means on the ground

For ordinary Cubans, a failure of the Cuba power grid hits far more than the lights. The outages knock out water pumps, internet and phone service, transport, and refrigeration all at once. "It's one thing after another: no water, no gas for cooking, no electricity," 36-year-old Lidia Fernandez told AFP. "Honestly, I don't know how we haven't gone crazy."

"No one can stand these constant blackouts. There isn't enough food, there's no water, there's no electricity, you have no idea," 60-year-old Mercedes Rodriguez told the AP. "The country is in such a sad state, and there are no words for what we're going through."

The outages are landing on a population already under severe economic strain. An independent study released this week estimated that 66 percent of Cubans now live in poverty, up from 45 percent in mid-2025, with rising food prices doing much of the damage.

The US Embassy in Havana issued a security alert hours after the collapse, telling Americans on the island that the timeline for restoring power was unknown. Embassy staff noted that cellphone and internet outages had followed the power failure, leaving many people unable to reach family or find reliable updates. The alert pointed US citizens to UNE's daily updates and local media for restoration news.

Crews spent Saturday working through the restoration protocols, reconnecting the system region by region. Grid officials have warned that the network remains fragile, so residents across the island are bracing for more rolling cuts in the days ahead. Until the system is stable, Cuba faces the same pattern that has defined its year: scheduled outages layered on top of sudden collapses, with no clear end in sight. Fixing the Cuba power grid for good would take new plants, new transmission lines, and a fuel supply the island does not currently have.

More on infrastructure and energy strain: NATS Software Glitch Grounded Thousands of UK Flights, Saudi Oil Pipeline Attack: Why Your Gas Bill Might Spike, and Earth Is Draining Its Freshwater Savings Account, WMO Warns.

Source: LaPresse/AP reporting on the blackout