High tension electrical wires as Cuba brought its national electrical grid back online after the country had been largely without power for 16 hours in an outage that Energy Ministry officials linked to the oil blockade of Cuba imposed by the United States, in Havana, Cuba, March 5, 2026. REUTERS/Norlys Perez
(La Habana, Cuba) – Cuba’s aging electrical infrastructure has struggled for years, but the situation has worsened in recent months as fuel shortages and economic problems compound the crisis.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged last week that the country has not received oil shipments in three months, forcing the government to rely heavily on solar power, natural gas and aging thermoelectric plants. Hospitals have reportedly delayed tens of thousands of surgeries due to energy shortages.
Residents across Havana described the outages as devastating to daily life.
“What little we have to eat spoils,” said 61-year-old Tomás David Velázquez Felipe. “Our people are too old to keep suffering.”
The Cuban government has partly blamed the United States for the country’s energy struggles, pointing to sanctions and new tariff threats announced earlier this year by the Trump administration targeting countries that sell oil to Cuba.
Experts say the island’s power grid is also suffering from decades of underinvestment and deteriorating infrastructure.
“The technicians working on the grid are magicians to keep it running at all given the shape that it’s in,” said American University professor William LeoGrande, who studies U.S.–Cuba relations.
LeoGrande warned that continued shortages could lead to economic collapse, social unrest, and mass migration from the island if conditions worsen.
Trump’s comment about “taking” Cuba has not been clarified by the White House, and it remains unclear whether the president was speaking rhetorically or referencing a broader strategy toward the struggling nation.
The island lies just 90 miles from Florida, and any major instability in Cuba has historically had direct implications for U.S. migration and foreign policy.
