09/21/2026
The U.S. Embassy in Havana said the failure came from a "collapse of Cuba's electrical grid," and Cuban regime media reported that the cause is under investigation with no known timeline for getting the lights back on.
The collapse hit around 1:52 p.m. local time Friday, after two 220 kV transmission lines out of Matanzas tripped in succession, first splitting the grid regionally and then taking the whole National Electroenergetic System down within minutes. Officials pointed to unstable weather as an aggravating factor, on a day the grid was already running about 1,113 MW against forecast demand of roughly 3,210 MW.
Power began trickling back Friday night through isolated "microsystems" prioritizing hospitals, water pumping and telecom. By Saturday, restoration was still partial and uneven, with one update putting Havana at around 44% of customers reconnected.
Depending on how you count, this is the seventh or eighth total collapse of Cuba's grid this year, with the last one hitting in early August, about six weeks ago. The embassy called the grid "increasingly unstable," warning that outages are happening more often and lasting longer, with scheduled cuts every day and unscheduled ones on top of them.
There are reports of cellphone and internet outages across the island. The embassy urged U.S. citizens in Cuba or planning to travel there to plan accordingly.
The power system has been buckling under fuel shortages, a U.S. oil pressure campaign that intensified in January and crumbling infrastructure. Even without a full national blackout, rolling outages of 30 or more hours in Havana, and longer in the provinces, regularly leave millions of Cubans in the dark.
