Power Goes Out Across Much of Cuba as Havana’s Woes Mount

(Bloomberg) -- Cuba suffered a massive blackout Wednesday, with the electrical grid that stretches across about two-thirds of the country collapsing amid an intensifying US push to deprive the government in Havana of fuel and financing.

The outage covered most of the island from Camaguey to Pinar del Rio, the Ministry of Energy and Mines said in post on X. But it added that the Felton 1 power plant remained online and said “all protocols have been activated to begin the recovery.”

Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero later pinpointed the reason for the mass blackout. The Antonio Guiteras power plant — the island’s largest, located in Matanzas — unexpectedly went off line, dragging down the grid, he said on X.

Agence France-Presse confirmed the capital of Havana was affected. Power outages are common on the island of 10 million people amid fuel shortages and aging plants. It suffered a half dozen national blackouts in the span of a year.

The communist-run island is also being squeezed by Washington, with President Donald Trump’s administration halting shipments of subsidized oil from Venezuela and threatening tariffs on any other nation that comes to Cuba’s energy aid.

While the US recently began allowing Cuban private companies to import their own fuel, the quantities are just a fraction of what the island needs. The country’s thermoelectric power plants require about 100,000 barrels of oil a day to meet demand and domestic production accounts for just two fifths of that.

Available electricity has plummeted since the start of the year. It’s disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery, with the level of light emitted at night in some cities dropping as much as 50% compared to the historical average.

The last major fuel delivery arrived from Mexico on Jan. 9, with the island logging its first month without oil imports in a decade. The Trump’s administration’s move to allow private imports, meanwhile, is part of a plan to make Cuba more reliant on the US for supplies and increase Washington’s leverage to bring about change.

In addition, the US government has been attacking Cuba’s sources of revenue — from tourism to its medical brigades — important sources of hard currency. Trump has said he expects the 67-year-old regime to collapse under its own weight. 

In response to the downturn Havana has started to introduce economic reforms. On Tuesday, it authorized private companies to partner with state-run enterprises after President Miguel Diaz-Canel told lawmakers that “urgent” change was needed in the centrally planned economy.

(Updates with PM’s comment and additional context beginning in third paragraph. A previous version corrected the spelling of Agence France-Presse in the fourth.)

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