Cuba's national electricity grid collapsed for the seventh time this year on Friday, leaving all 9.4 million inhabitants without power in the latest and most severe episode of an ongoing energy crisis. The outage began shortly after midday local time due to a fault on transmission lines, which first knocked out the five western provinces — including the capital, Havana — before cascading across all fifteen provinces on the island. State grid operator UNE said restoration protocols were activated immediately, and by Saturday evening power had been reconnected to fourteen of the fifteen provinces, with the easternmost province of Guantánamo the last to remain offline. Despite the reconnection of the national grid, large swathes of the country remained in darkness due to critically low generation capacity; as of Saturday night, only around 48% of Havana's population had electricity.

The scale of the crisis reflects years of deteriorating infrastructure colliding with a dramatic tightening of external pressure. Cuba's electricity system depends on seven ageing thermoelectric power stations, which were already operating far below capacity before Friday's collapse. On the day of the blackout, UNE had anticipated that available generation would reach only 1,110 megawatts against a peak demand of 3,200 megawatts. The situation has worsened sharply since late 2024, when oil shipments from Venezuela — Cuba's regional ally which had been supplying roughly 35,000 barrels per day, about half of the island's needs — effectively ceased after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was detained in a US operation in January. US President Donald Trump subsequently threatened tariffs on any country exporting oil to Cuba, causing most foreign fuel deliveries to halt. A fresh round of US sanctions was announced in August.

For ordinary Cubans, the repeated blackouts have translated into grinding daily hardship. Residents of Havana have reported going without electricity for stretches of 24 to 30 hours at a time, while some provinces have endured more than 60 consecutive hours without power. Shortages of water, cooking gas, food, and medicine compound the difficulties. "It's one thing after another: no water, no gas for cooking, no electricity," said Lidia Fernandez, a 36-year-old schoolteacher in Havana. "Honestly, I don't know how we haven't gone crazy." The previous nationwide blackout, in early August, took 36 hours to resolve.

The energy crisis has become a sharply contested political issue. The Cuban government attributes the collapse of its electricity system directly to US sanctions and the oil blockade, which it says prevent the island from sourcing the fuel needed to run its generators. Washington, by contrast, blames poor internal economic management and has framed Cuba as a national security concern. Trump has gone further, openly discussing regime change and floating the idea of a "friendly takeover" of the island in March. The repeated outages have sparked rare public protests inside Cuba, where unauthorised demonstrations are illegal and participants risk imprisonment — a measure of how severely the population's tolerance has been tested.