Cuba was plunged into a nationwide blackout on March 16, affecting the island’s roughly 11 million residents, as the country’s worsening energy and economic crises continue to strain an already fragile power grid.
Cuba’s power went out on Monday, residents were warned to “take precautions.”
On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, reported that the national electrical grid collapsed at 1:54 p.m. local time, “resulting in a total power outage” across Cuba and the Havana metro areas. Officials cautioned that there was no clear timeline for when electricity would return, describing the system as “increasingly unstable,” with “prolonged scheduled and unscheduled power outages” now a daily reality across the country, including the capital.
The embassy also urged residents to “take precautions by conserving fuel, water, food, and mobile phone charge,” and to “be prepared for significant disruption.”
According to NPR, Cuba’s Ministry of Energy and Mines said in a post on X that officials were investigating the outage, noting there were no apparent failures in the units operating at the time the grid went down. Lázaro Guerra, the ministry’s electricity director, later told state media that crews were working to bring several thermoelectric plants back online, an essential step toward restoring power.
“It must be done gradually to avoid setbacks,” he said. “Because systems, when very weak, are more susceptible to failure.”
The blackout marked the third major outage in Cuba in just four months.
For many residents, the repeated disruptions have become unbearable. Tomás David Velázquez Felipe, a 61-year-old Havana resident, said the constant power outages are pushing people to consider leaving the country altogether.
“What little we have to eat spoils,” he told NPR. “Our people are too old to keep suffering.”
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