HAVANA — Cuba’s power grid collapsed again Saturday, plunging the island into a nationwide blackout — the third major outage this month — as authorities struggled with aging equipment and fuel shortages.
The state-run Cuban Electric Union, part of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, first reported a total loss of service without naming a specific cause. The ministry later said the outage began with an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey province, which triggered cascading failures among other units that were online.
Officials activated isolated groups of generators, or ‘micro-islands,’ to restore electricity to critical facilities such as hospitals and water systems while technicians worked to bring the grid back online.
Widespread and regional outages have become more frequent over the past two years as aging infrastructure breaks down. Those breakdowns are compounded by scheduled daily blackouts of up to 12 hours imposed to conserve limited fuel, which further destabilize the system. Saturday’s total collapse followed a nationwide outage earlier in the week and was the second major interruption in seven days.
The repeated blackouts are disrupting daily life: work hours are reduced, cooking is interrupted, refrigerated goods spoil and some hospitals have been forced to postpone surgeries.
Cuban officials say the island has not received oil from foreign suppliers for three months and that Cuba produces roughly 40 percent of the fuel it needs. The government has pointed to a U.S. energy pressure campaign after President Donald Trump warned of tariffs on countries that sell oil to Cuba and has tied sanctions relief in part to political conditions in Cuba. The loss of Venezuelan petroleum shipments after political changes there has further cut fuel supplies, complicating efforts to stabilize the electrical system.
Restoration teams continued work on the network while authorities assessed repairs and fuel needs to prevent future collapses.