Cuba's Power Grid Collapsed for the Third Time This Month. It May Not Be the Last.

The structural cause is not the Nuevitas plant. It's fuel. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said publicly last week that Cuba had not received oil from any foreign supplier in three months. The island produces barely 40 percent of the fuel it needs to power its economy. The rest has historically come from two sources: Venezuela, whose subsidized oil shipments were Cuba's lifeline for two decades, and spot-market purchases from various suppliers willing to navigate US secondary sanctions.

“President Miguel Díaz-Canel said publicly last week that Cuba had not received oil from any foreign supplier in three months.”

Both of those pipelines are now closed. Venezuela's oil shipments ended in January after US forces arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the Trump administration took control of Venezuelan oil flows. That single event removed roughly 50,000 to 60,000 barrels per day of Cuban imports overnight. The Iranian oil crisis has since pushed spot market prices to levels that make even willing suppliers economically unattractive given the sanction risk. President Trump warned in January that any country selling or providing oil to Cuba would face US tariffs — a threat that has functioned as an informal secondary boycott.

Cuba produces oil domestically, largely from offshore fields and onshore deposits in the western provinces, but its production infrastructure is aging and inadequately maintained. The country generates barely 14,000 barrels per day domestically — enough to power a city, not a country. The gap between production and need is structural.

The social consequences have moved past inconvenience into crisis. Cubans in Havana are living with daily blackouts of up to 15 hours. In rural areas, the figure is worse. Food spoilage from refrigerator outages has become a significant problem in a country where the food distribution system already operates at the margin. Workers are losing wages as businesses and factories shut down for lack of power. Schools have shortened hours or closed entirely. Dialysis patients are being triaged.

Protests have been reported in multiple provinces over the past week — small by the standards of the July 2021 demonstrations that shook the Cuban government, but notable in a country where public dissent carries serious legal risk. The government's response has alternated between blaming the US blockade and promising technical solutions that have not materialized. Trump, for his part, has suggested he believes Cuba's government is "on the verge of collapse" and told reporters he'd soon have "the honor of taking Cuba" — a comment whose precise meaning was left to interpretation.

What's counterintuitive about Cuba's situation is that the island sits relatively close to some of the largest oil producers in the Western Hemisphere — the United States, Mexico, Colombia, and Trinidad — none of which Cuba can purchase from at scale under current conditions. The geography of the energy crisis is an artifact of diplomacy, not physics. A government willing to make concessions on political prisoners and governance — Trump's stated conditions — could potentially unlock supply routes relatively quickly. Whether the Cuban government is capable of making those concessions, or whether it would survive doing so domestically, is the question that neither Washington nor Havana has answered.

A fourth blackout this month is not certain. But the underlying conditions — no oil inflows, aging generators, and a grid that has already failed three times — make it more likely than not.