Cuba's electricity grid has collapsed six times this year, leaving residents on the communist-run island scrambling to cook, wash, and pump water during unpredictable bursts of power that sometimes arrive in the middle of the night.
Leidis Rodríguez, a 72-year-old Havana resident, found herself boiling beans at 3 a.m. one morning this week after hours of unbroken darkness. When the lights flickered on, she shouted to her family. The Associated Press reported that a 20-minute return of electricity now counts as a small event worth celebrating in Cuba's capital, a city where outages stretch 12, 30, or more hours at a stretch with no schedule and no warning.
The crisis has been building for five years, fed by a crumbling energy grid, decades of U.S. sanctions, and failed economic reforms by Cuba's communist government. But conditions have deteriorated sharply since January, when the Trump administration threatened tariffs on goods from any country that sells or provides oil to Cuba and layered on tighter sanctions, a pressure campaign aimed at forcing political change on the island.
Before the latest squeeze, Cuba's government at least scheduled its blackouts. Residents could plan around two- or three-hour windows of lost power. That system is gone. Outages now arrive without notice and last far longer. Last weekend, the entire national grid went down, the sixth full collapse of 2026.
Yaimara Matos, Rodríguez's 41-year-old daughter, described the frantic math of daily survival:
"You want to do everything at the same time, wash clothes, iron, cook, tidy the rooms, because it's impossible in the dark, and even get a little relief from the heat. What we used to do in 10 hours, we now have to do in two."
No electricity means no water in much of Havana, because pumps cannot push it to rooftop tanks. Rodríguez put the bind plainly: "If there's no electricity, there's no water because it doesn't get pumped to the tank. When there's water, there's no electricity."
The family pooled money to buy a small generator, but fuel costs limit them to running it only a few hours a day. Others have fewer options. Lianet Barroso, another Havana resident, has abandoned her gas stove and now cooks over a wood fire. She fills plastic bottles with water whenever power returns, stockpiling against the next outage.
The blackouts have flattened what remained of Cuba's economy. Public transportation and cultural events have ground to a halt. Tourism companies, unnamed in available reporting, have pulled out of the island entirely, leaving an estimated 25,000 hospitality jobs vacant. Flights to Cuba are regularly canceled. Workdays have been shortened. Inflation is surging, and the Cuban currency has lost value against the dollar.
The collapse of Cuba's fuel reserves sits at the center of the crisis. Without reliable oil imports, the island's aging power plants cannot keep the grid running, and the cascading failures, no power, no water, no refrigeration, have made daily life a grinding exercise in improvisation.
Medicine shortages have worsened. Food rots in refrigerators during the long outages. Caridad Delgado, a 64-year-old Havana resident whose three children have emigrated from Cuba, described what her evenings look like now. At 10 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, she was preparing food for her cat under the glow of a rechargeable lamp, purchased with remittances her children sent from abroad.
Months earlier, she said, she would have been watching a soap opera at that hour. "Now I can't even dream of it," Delgado told the AP.
Neighborhood protests have broken out in several municipalities, particularly in Havana, after blackouts exceeded 48 hours. The AP report did not specify whether those demonstrations led to arrests, injuries, or any formal government response, a gap worth noting in a country where the communist government has historically treated public dissent as a security threat.
The Trump administration's pressure campaign against Havana has extended well beyond energy. Washington has tightened sanctions, pursued asset freezes, and brought criminal charges as part of a broader effort to hold Cuba's regime accountable. And the diplomatic channel has not gone silent, CIA Director Ratcliffe met Cuban officials in Havana as the island's oil situation deteriorated.
Cuba's own government bears enormous responsibility for the conditions its people now endure. Five years of worsening blackouts preceded the Trump administration's January actions. The grid was already crumbling. Economic reforms have failed. The regime's decades of central planning produced an energy infrastructure so fragile that the loss of subsidized foreign oil exposed it completely.
The communist government has even adopted sweeping free-market reforms, a tacit admission that its own economic model cannot feed or power the island.
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence agencies have documented the regime's hostility toward Washington even as it asks for relief. A State Department report accused Cuba of running spy networks and influence operations inside the United States for decades, a record that makes the case for sustained pressure rather than accommodation.
Delgado captured the emotional weight of the crisis in two sentences:
"There's just too much anguish, too much desperation. I try to carry on with life."
Barroso was blunter: "Life for Cubans has become difficult, harsh and sad."
The human cost is real and visible. Elderly women cooking over wood fires. Families waking at 3 a.m. to boil beans. A 64-year-old feeding her cat by the light of a lamp her emigrated children paid for. These are not abstractions. They are the daily consequences of a government that spent decades refusing to build an economy that works, and now cannot keep the lights on for 20 minutes at a stretch.
American pressure did not create Cuba's dysfunction. Sixty years of communist mismanagement did that. The sanctions accelerated a reckoning that was already coming, and the people paying the price are not the regime officials in Havana, but ordinary Cubans who never had a vote in any of it.
