MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Cuba suffers nationwide blackout after total collapse of national power grid

The blackout follows months of accelerating deterioration in Cuba’s power system

Cuba suffered a nationwide blackout on Monday after the Ministry of Energy and Mines reported a “complete disconnection” of the National Electric System, leaving virtually the entire island without power. The collapse hit a country of roughly 10 to 11 million people and came amid an energy crisis that had already been causing prolonged outages and severe generation deficits.

Authorities said they were investigating the cause of the collapse and indicated that no failure had been detected in the generating units that were operating when the grid went down. The government said restoration protocols had been activated but gave no timetable for a full recovery of service.

The blackout follows months of accelerating deterioration in Cuba’s power system. Generation infrastructure is aging, suffers from poor maintenance and depends on imported fuel in a context of acute scarcity. AP described it as the third major nationwide blackout in four months, while Reuters placed it within a pattern of outages in recent months lasting hours and sometimes days.

Pressure on the grid has intensified because of shrinking oil supplies. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said on Friday that Cuba had not received fuel shipments for three months, and Reuters reported that the island has received only two small cargoes this year, one from Mexico and one liquefied petroleum gas shipment from Jamaica, with no deliveries from Venezuela, historically its main supplier.

That situation has worsened daily blackouts, fuel shortages, food and medicine scarcity, and public frustration. In recent days there have been nighttime protests and pot-banging demonstrations in different parts of the country, including a violent episode over the weekend in Morón.

The grid collapse also coincided with a significant economic announcement. Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Perez-Oliva Fraga said in an interview aired on Monday that Cuba would allow nationals living abroad to invest in and own businesses on the island, a policy shift aimed at attracting capital amid deepening economic deterioration.

The combination of an obsolete grid, fuel shortages and economic contraction has once again placed the electricity system at the center of Cuba’s crisis. For now, the government has only confirmed that it is working on a gradual restoration of service while trying to prevent the new total blackout from further aggravating social tensions.