HAVANA — Cuba’s power grid collapsed Saturday, plunging the entire island into darkness for the third time this month as officials contend with a deteriorating electrical system and fuel shortages blamed in part on a U.S. blockade.
The state-run Cuban Electric Union, under the Ministry of Energy and Mines, initially reported a total blackout without specifying a cause. The ministry later attributed the outage to an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey province. The ministry said the failure produced a cascading effect among other units that were online.
Authorities activated “micro-islands” — isolated groups of generators — to supply electricity to critical facilities, including hospitals and water systems, while technicians worked to restore service.
Nationwide and regional outages have become more frequent over the past two years as aging infrastructure breaks down. These failures are compounded by scheduled daily blackouts of up to 12 hours caused by fuel shortages, which further destabilize the system. Saturday’s blackout followed a nationwide outage on Monday and was the second major interruption in the past week.
The repeated blackouts disrupt daily life, reducing work hours, interrupting cooking, spoiling refrigerated food and forcing some hospitals to cancel surgeries. Cuban officials say the country has not received oil from foreign suppliers for three months; Cuba produces roughly 40% of the fuel it needs to operate its economy.
The government has also blamed a U.S. energy blockade after President Donald Trump warned in January of tariffs on countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba. The U.S. administration has linked relief of sanctions to Cuba freeing political prisoners and moving toward political and economic reform, and Trump has at times suggested the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Cuba’s loss of Venezuelan support for petroleum shipments following the removal of that country’s leader has further reduced critical fuel supplies, complicating efforts to stabilize the island’s power system. After an earlier nationwide collapse of the grid, Trump told reporters he believed he might soon have “the honor of taking Cuba.”