(Bloomberg) — Cuba suffered a massive power outage on Wednesday when the power grid that stretches across two-thirds of the country collapsed amid mounting U.S. pressure to deprive the government in Havana of fuel and funding.
The outage covered most of the island from Camaguey to Pinar del Rio, the Ministry of Energy and Mines said in a post on X. But it added that the Felton 1 plant remained online and said “all protocols have been activated to begin 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 — shut down unexpectedly, taking down the grid, he said on X.
Agence France-Presse confirmed that the capital, Havana, had been hit. Power outages are common on the island of 10 million people due to fuel shortages and aging power plants. Within a year, it suffered half a dozen nationwide blackouts.
The communist-ruled island is also under pressure from Washington, with President Donald Trump’s administration halting shipments of subsidized oil from Venezuela and threatening to impose tariffs on any other nation that comes for Cuban energy aid.
While the U.S. recently began allowing Cuban private companies to import their own fuel, the amounts are only a fraction of what the island needs. The country’s thermal power plants need about 100,000 barrels of oil a day to meet demand, and domestic production accounts for just two-fifths of that.
Available electricity has fallen sharply since the beginning of the year. It disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial centers, with light levels emitted at night in some cities dropping by as much as 50% compared to historical averages, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite images.
The last major shipment of fuel arrived from Mexico on January 9, with the island seeing its first month without oil imports in a decade. The Trump administration’s move to allow private imports, meanwhile, is part of a plan to increase Cuba’s dependence on U.S. supplies and increase Washington’s leverage to effect change.
In addition, the US government is attacking Cuba’s sources of income – from tourism to its medical brigades – an important source of hard currency. Trump said he expected the 67-year-old regime to collapse under its own weight.
In response to the downturn, Havana began implementing economic reforms. It allowed private companies to partner with state-owned enterprises on Tuesday after President Miguel Diaz-Canel told lawmakers that “urgent” change was needed in the centrally planned economy.
(Update with Prime Minister’s comment and additional context beginning in the third paragraph. A previous version corrected Agence France-Presse’s spelling in the fourth.)
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