Cuba was plunged into its third nationwide power outage of 2026 on Monday, the state electricity company UNE announced, as the Caribbean island's decades-old energy infrastructure buckles under a severe fuel shortage intensified by US pressure. The utility confirmed on X that there had been "a total disconnection from the national electricity generation system" and that the causes were under investigation, while the Ministry of Energy and Mines said it had activated restoration protocols. By late afternoon, Havana — the capital — had only 1% of its electricity demand covered.

The blackout is the eighth to strike the island of 9.6 million people since late 2024. Cuba, a communist-run state in the Caribbean that has long faced US sanctions, was already struggling with an ageing grid composed largely of Soviet-era power plants before President Donald Trump tightened the screws in January, threatening tariffs on any country that sells or supplies oil to the island. Since then, Washington has permitted only one oil tanker — carrying Russian crude — to dock in Cuba, and the 730,000 barrels it delivered in late March had run out by the end of April. Cuba produces just 40% of the fuel it requires domestically. The fuel squeeze has cascaded into wider shortages: food, drinking water and medicine are increasingly scarce, tens of thousands of surgeries have been cancelled, public transport has largely ground to a halt, and the United Nations has warned of a humanitarian emergency.

For ordinary Cubans, the outage compounded an already desperate daily reality. Many neighbourhoods in Havana had already been surviving on three or four hours of electricity per day before the total collapse. "Living like this is agony," said Meyboll Font, 51, a self-employed social media manager, adding that the total blackout was worse because "you never know when it will return." A 36-year-old resident, Lina May, worried about how to cook a meal, saying she told her father they needed to buy charcoal or they would go hungry. "We're without power again — now we have no water, no gas, nothing," said Richard Valdés, 40. Others expressed a weary resignation: "Oil hasn't come in here for a while, and we have no way to solve the problem," said Mario Pedroso, 33. "We have to resist, as we Cubans say. That's all."

The Cuban government has framed the crisis in geopolitical terms. President Miguel Díaz-Canel accused Washington of trying to "incite social unrest by strangling Cuba's fuel supply," calling the actions of electricity workers "heroic" in the face of what he described as a "genocidal energy blockade." Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said microsystems were brought online within hours to protect vital services. Cuba has invested in solar energy as an alternative, but it still represents only around 10% of the national energy mix. A recent government announcement of broad free-market economic reforms was dismissed by the US State Department as a "superficial smokescreen," and diplomatic talks between the two sides have so far yielded no breakthrough, according to Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez. With no clear path to resolving the fuel impasse, Cubans face the prospect of further collapse in the weeks ahead.