Cuba's Power Crisis: A New Blackout Leaves Millions in the Dark

Cuba woke up Saturday morning to widespread darkness after its electricity grid collapsed the previous evening, knocking out power for 10 million people across the island. The massive blackout is raising serious concerns about the reliability of Cuba's aging power infrastructure, which has long been under strain.

By sunrise, the island's electricity operator, UNE, reported generating only a fraction of the required power—about 225 megawatts, or less than 10% of total demand. This limited energy supply was being allocated to critical services like hospitals, water distribution systems, and food production facilities, leaving much of the population without power for daily needs.

Officials began the process of restarting the country’s decades-old power plants but offered no timeline for when electricity would be fully restored. The outage began Friday evening at around 8:15 p.m., triggered by a failure in a transmission line component located at a substation in Havana. The malfunction set off a domino effect that brought the island's entire grid to a halt.

This latest failure comes on the heels of a series of nationwide blackouts late last year, which left the fragile system teetering under the weight of fuel shortages, natural disasters, and ongoing economic turmoil. For many Cubans outside Havana, rolling blackouts have already become a grim reality, with outages stretching up to 20 hours a day in recent weeks.

Havana itself remained mostly powerless on Saturday morning. Streets were eerily quiet as light traffic maneuvered through intersections without functioning stoplights. Cellular internet access was spotty or entirely absent in several areas.

Residents like Abel Bonne, who spent the night enduring stifling heat without electricity, sought relief by gathering along Havana's Malecon waterfront boulevard. "Right now, no one knows when the power will come back on," Bonne commented. "This is the first time this year, but last year it happened three times."

The blackout is exacerbating an already dire situation on the island, where shortages of food, medicine, and clean water have made daily life increasingly unbearable. The crisis has driven record numbers of Cubans to flee the country in recent years.

Cuban officials have blamed the nation's economic woes, including its inability to update outdated transmission and generation infrastructure, on the longstanding U.S. trade embargo. The embargo, which dates back to the Cold War era, imposes stringent restrictions on financial transactions and the importation of essential goods like fuel and spare parts.

In recent years, sanctions on Cuba have been tightened further, with former U.S. President Donald Trump pledging to adopt a "tough" stance against the communist-led government.

Despite the blackout, life in Havana continued, albeit under challenging circumstances. Yunior Reyes, a bike taxi driver, resumed work Saturday morning, worried that the heat would spoil his food supplies. "We're all in the same situation," Reyes remarked. "It's a lot of work."