Islandwide blackout hits Cuba as island struggles with deepening energy crisis

HAVANA (AP) — Officials in Cuba reported an islandwide blackout Monday in the country of some 11 million people as its energy and economic crises deepen and its power grid continues to crumble.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines on X noted a “complete disconnection” of the country’s electrical system and said it was investigating, noting there were no failures in the units that were operating when the grid collapsed.

It was the third major blackout in Cuba over the past four months.

Tomás David Velázquez Felipe, a 61-year-old resident of Havana, said the relentless outages make him think that Cubans who can should just pack up and leave the island.

“What little we have to eat spoils,” he said.

“Our people are too old to keep suffering.”

Cuba’s ageing grid has drastically eroded in recent years, leading to an increase in daily outages and island-wide blackouts.

But the government also has blamed its woes on a US energy blockade after President Donald Trump in January warned of tariffs on any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba.

The Trump administration is demanding that Cuba release political prisoners and move toward political and economic liberalization in return for a lifting of sanctions.

William LeoGrande, a professor at American University who has tracked Cuba for years, said the country’s energy grid hasn’t been maintained properly and its infrastructure is “way past its normal useful life.”

“The technicians working on the grid are magicians to keep it running at all given the shape that it’s in,” LeoGrande said.

LeoGrande said that if the island drastically reduces consumption and expands renewables, it can struggle along for a while without oil shipments.

“But it would be constant misery for the general population, and eventually, the economy could collapse just completely and then you would have social chaos and probably mass migration,” he said.

To ramp up solar power even faster than Cuba did last year, LeoGrande said other countries, principally China, would have to be willing to double or more their provision of such equipment.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Friday said the island had not received oil shipments in three months and was operating on solar power, natural gas and thermoelectric plants, and that the government has had to postpone surgeries for tens of thousands of people.

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