Blackouts in Cuba: An ever-darkening crisis

Since the summer of 2022, Cuba has suffered a multitude of blackouts, several of them massive, which have left ten million people without electricity for days and even weeks: homes often in darkness, where food from refrigerators is wasted, and hospitals that must use emergency generators that are ineffective. With the restriction of oil from Venezuela (electricity generation is mostly by liquid hydrocarbons), Mexico has also begun to submit subsidized fuel, but an obsolete infrastructure is making the government's effort ineffective, in the face of a growing citizen discontent and already overwhelmed by the economic crisis suffered by the island, the greatest in the history of Castroism.

Cuba already had an energy B during the 'Special Period' in the early 1990s. The fall of the Soviet Union was a hard blow for Cuba, since, in addition to the soft credits granted to Havana (some 65 billion dollars in thirty years), Moscow also stopped submit food, machinery and, very notably, fuel (the USSR covered 98% of Cuba's energy needs). The Soviet Union was Cuba's main trading partner , accounting for 72% of the island's export and import exchange . This abrupt cut in supplies generated a domino effect in Cuba's productive sector, leading the country into a deep economic crisis whose most severe effects were felt between 1991 and 1993.

But although the general status slightly recovered afterwards, the energy crisis began to worsen during the 2000s. Summer marks a period in which the island's population makes more use of its electrical appliances, largely due to the high temperatures, which in the period 2001-2005 caused repeated supply deficiencies that the regime presented as certain "electrical variations". The Castro regime attributed the blackouts to "unexpected ruptures or collapses". In 2004, the government implemented a series of daily six-hour blackouts, Monday through Friday, rotating them among different municipalities. In 2005, blackouts could extend up to ten hours depending on the region. Faced with this status, in 2006 the government carried out what it called the "energy revolution", with the intention of improving power transmission and modernizing poles, wires and other facilities. Small diesel plants were also installed, greatly reducing the energy instability experienced in previous years.

The provisional success of this "energy revolution", however, was due in large part to the Venezuelan oil that Hugo Chavez began to provide to Cuba at that time. The modernization of electrical installations does not constitute a real improvement without a constant flow of fuel, which was provided by Venezuela. This dependence has been especially manifest in recent years, in which, due to the Venezuelan internal crisis and the US sanctions against PDVSA, which have added more difficulties to production, Caracas has been greatly reducing its oil exports to Cuba. From initial flows of just over 100,000 barrels of oil per day, which Cuba used for electricity production but also partly resold from the activity of the Cienfuegos refinery, revitalized in 2007 with Venezuelan public funds, Chavism has gone to supplying half.

The Cuban energy crisis has been parallel to this reduction in Venezuelan fuel shipments, aggravated by the lack of maintenance in power generation plants, leading to the multiple outbreaks of blackouts and energy deficits that the island is experiencing. The current crisis started especiallyin the summer of 2022, when a fire at the Matanzas supertanker base turned the status into a chronic one. In the last three years, between September 27, 2022 and September 10, 2025, more than five national blackouts have been reported, leaving at least ten million people without power for fifteen to sixteen hours, in some places for weeks at a time.

With Venezuela itself in serious difficulties, Mexico has lent itself to making oil shipments to Cuba. This policy began to be applied in the final stretch of the six-year term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and is being continued by his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who has tripled the quantities provided. In the first months of 2025, the freighters would have carried to the island an average of about 200,000 barrels per day of subsidized fuel, offered by a subsidiary of Pemex, a Mexican national oil company with high debts.

The blackouts have result in widespread unrest, reflected in frequent citizen protests, which sometimes take the form of pots and pans and are violently suppressed by the government. There have been traffic lights down during rush hour, suspension of daily activities (work and academic schedules) and a direct impact on Cuban homes, which are left in complete darkness, with refrigerators and fridges unable to preserve food, and without water service, whose activation depends on the electricity supply. Vital sectors such as hospitals are left dependent on inefficient emergency generators, damaged by their continuous use. Sensitive equipment and emergency care are thus disabled for prolonged periods of time.

Causes of energy status

Cuba's electricity network reaches the entire population, but its generation does not fully cover the demands of new social uses, in addition to the fact that the installed capacity does not perform as officially foreseen. The island has an installed capacity of 7,264 million kilowatts, 95.2% of which uses fossil fuels as a source ; the rest corresponds to solar, wind, hydro and biomass energy. Cuba is highly dependent on oil, since it does not have significant coal reserves; nor has it made an effort to make a leap in renewable energies.

However, the lack of fuel is not the only manager of the system's deficiencies. The national electricity system, built after 1959, has gone 35 years without receiving the maintenance and investment necessary to function properly, resulting in its current distressing status . In many cases the infrastructure has exceeded its expected useful life, creating an obsolete and fragile system, where a local failure can have a domino effect on the entire system. Many plant components, such as engines, turbines or boilers, require urgent replacement, but financial restrictions and economic sanctions make it impossible to import new parts. In addition, some of the fuel used, which is cheap and corrosive, accelerates the erosion of the infrastructure.

The underlying economic crisis, which affects all sectors of the country, also has its effects on electricity production. Because of the drop in tourism (initially due to Covid-19, but later prolonged due to the unattractiveness of traveling to a country in deep crisis and with blackouts) the government has special problems in accessing foreign currency, which hinders the task of modernization and replacement of machinery. The lack of energy diversification has also been mentioned as one of the factors responsible for this crisis, since although Cuba has planned certain solar energy plant projects with the support of China, this partnership has suffered certain delays.

Occasional weather events, such as Hurricane Milton in 2024, caused flooding and high winds which damaged the already weakened infrastructure. However, analysts point to the Cuban government's incompetence and ineptitude in dealing with these outages. Bureaucratic obstacles that slow down repairs and the prioritization within the scarce budget of other sectors, such as tourism, worsen the process. In addition, the current crisis has provoked the largest migratory wave since the Cuban revolution, leaving the island with an increasingly aging and unskilled population.